Just Pull The Lever, Fill in The Empty Oval or Remove the Hanging Chad – Just Do It!
We are less than a week away from the 2010 mid-term elections. If you do not have a calendar, you still know that the campaign process for public office is nearing its end simply by watching television. The time slots normally reserved for advertising products spew negative campaign advertisements filled with bilious, personal attacks where opponents are labeled whores, liars, thieves, and corrupt and valueless souls, or worse.
As each candidate exchanges hateful barbs and hurtful personal attacks, each candidate claims to be better than the other is. Each claims a more upright, higher principled and greater means of problem solving and getting things done efficiently and on budget. Each candidate accuses the other of incompetence, negligence, naïveté or having an interest beyond simple government service; a motive of corruption, or personal benefit, of greed or playing to special interests in order to achieve or maintain power.
The fact of the matter is that highlighting these “issues” do nothing to solve the problems facing either the Commonwealth or the Nation. Each candidate, as an individual, will have no ability to “give you lower taxes”, to “repeal Obamacare”, to “reign in Wall Street or the financial institutions”, etc. Each person is one vote of many required to accomplish anything at all.
No one individual has the power or the authority to mandate any change in the status quo. Some have the ability to be convincing and to inspire debate and rational discussion, but those are very few in number and even fewer in their ability to grab the spotlight and actually wield power.
Most of the power in our government has been shifting from elected officials to unelected commissions, boards and czars. We are moving toward what some in Britain, in particular, are attempting to move from. Here is an excerpt from the book, “The New Road to Serfdom”, Chapter 2, “American Democracy Works”, by Daniel Hannan, a British conservative:
“Anyone who has canvassed on the doorstep in Europe will tell you the answer [to the dwindling number of voters]: “It does not make any difference how I vote,” people complain. “Nothing ever changes.” The worst of it is that they have a point. With the best will in the world, there is less and less that European politicians can change. In recent decades, there has been a comprehensive shift in power from elected representatives to permanent functionaries, from local councils to central bureaucracies, from legislatures to executives, from national parliaments to Eurocrats, from the citizen to the state.
My own country [England] is now largely administered, not by MP [ED Members of Parliament] or local councilors, but by what we call quangos Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations.
You haven’t yet needed to come up with a name for them in the United States, but at the rate they are multiplying, you soon will.
A quangos is a state [or federal] agency, funded by the taxpayer, but at arm’s length from the government.
Every British politician, if he is being honest, will tell you that these standing apparats are the true source of power in modern Britain. When a constituent writes to you with a problem, the best thing you can do for him, nine times out of ten, is to pass his complaint on to the appropriate bureaucracy; the Child Support Agency, the Highway Authority, the Learning and Skills Council, the Health and Safety Executive, the Food Standards Agency, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. [ED I am certain you can list U.S. agencies, councils, czars or other bureaucrats in place of the British listings above]
As these functionaries have grown, representative government has shriveled. [ED Functionaries and liberty have an inversely proportionate relationship the each other – hence, for freedom loving people, the need to shrink government to only what is essential]. To quote the book for which this one is named, F.A. Hayek’s, “The Road to Serfdom”:
“The delegation of particular technical tasks to separate bodies, while a regular fixture, is yet the first step by which a democracy progressively relinquishes its powers.”
Of course, MPs do not like to advertise their powerlessness. They maintain the fiction that they are still in charge. [ED I would submit that some politicians actually believe that they actually have power of significance]. As a result, voters tend to blame their politicians for the failings of a government machine that no longer answers to anyone[ED – not even to the MPs themselves]. In the 1920s, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin accused the press of exercising “Power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.” Today’s MPs have the opposite: responsibility without power. Ceasing to be authoritative, they have become contemptible.
Skipping ahead to page 27-28, hard cover edition:
Are American politicians more virtuous than their European counterparts? No. Is corruption unknown in Washington? No. The difference between the two systems has to do, not with the integrity of the practitioners, but with the location of sovereignty. America’s Founding Fathers were determined, above all, to prevent the concentration of power. They know firsthand where such concentration led, and had spent years fighting the consequences. As Thomas Jefferson put it:
‘I do verily believe that if the principle were to prevail of a common law being in force in the United States (which principle possess the general government at once of all the powers of the state governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated government), it would become the most corrupt government on the earth.’”
To Sum It All Up
Do you have a right to be disillusioned with your candidates and their use of negative advertising? Yes. Do you have a right to be disillusioned and cynical about government considering the seeming unwillingness to change the status quo and institute a climate more favorable to the electorate than to the few in charge or of influence? Yes. However, does all of this give you the moral authority to not exercise your franchise and leave your vote at home? No.
If anything, the state of affairs described above puts an even greater moral responsibility to seek out and support those candidates who will fight to reduce the size of government by eliminating the non-elected power groups and doing the work the United States Constitution assigns to each official branch of government. If we are to remain a constitutional republic, Congress must take direct oversight of those issues under their control and remove authority given by Congress but not constitutionally assigned to the President or to the judiciary.
It is your responsibility to vote for those who you believe, once in the Congress, will fight to take back their rightful oversight powers usurped from the Executive and who you feel can be persuaded to lawfully remove non-elected bureaucrats from Czar and other Executive directed “oversight” positions and reasserting the oversight role established and prescribed for the Congress by the United States Constitution.
If you can’t get your candidates to talk about specific issues, ask them their position on this one government size, structure and states rights and vote accordingly. If not for you own sake, for the sake of your progeny, do not stay away from the polls. Vote and do so loudly and proudly and do so at every opportunity. Be strong, courageous and persistent in your principles and beliefs and look for the candidate who best represents you and your view of the America you want for you great, great grandchildren. Do you want them to look back at you with pride; or do you want them to look down at you with sadness and disdain?
Emphasis is mine, [ED ] indicates my editorial comments on the author’s statements
