“173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1787
Ten-year budget negotiations misdirect politicians, commentators, and voters. Politicians talk about saving in the future while they act to spend and inflate now.
Projecting spending is executive power. Even so, congressmen and presidents claim that it’s legal that they require that projections be made by a congressional budget office.
Any spending projections need to foretell politicians’ future actions as closely as possible.
Progressives’ future actions are predicted best by their present actions. If they cut spending now, that predicts that they will maintain those cuts. If they increase spending now, that predicts that they will maintain those increases. The most reality-based projection would simply start with politicians’ next-year budget and hold it constant at the same inflation-adjusted real rate across the balance of the ten-year budget.
This would also help further, because the ten-year projection would magnify the impact of Progressives’ current actions. Magnifying that impact upfront would strongly incentivize voters to push these politicians to take better actions now.
Unlike Progressives’ constant despotism, constitutionalists will increase freedom year after year, because constitutionalists’ simple process gets every incentive right.
The figure contrasts constitutionalists’ future workflow in the top half with Progressives’ current workflow in the bottom half.
Figure. Constitutionalists’ work will protect boundaries. Progressives’ work crosses boundaries.
Mostly, constitutionalist legislators will just expeditiously pass a single overall-total appropriation, then move on to passing constitutional rules and sanctions for the rest of the year. Also, they will provide broken-windows policing as soon as it’s needed to protect our rights, by summarily impeaching.
Constitutionalists in all jurisdictions will execute a commonsense workflow like what the Constitution requires:
Mostly, Progressive legislators logroll and demand spending, all year long. They also delegate away their legislative power to regulators, and grab more executive power by conducting oversight.
Progressives in all jurisdictions execute a dystopian workflow, defying the Constitution through and through:
- Executives give audiences of voters information on what we the people did, plus nauseating marketing of government.
- Legislators grab the executive power to allocate line items. They logroll, then treat each line item as mandatory to spend. Later they allocate supplemental or emergency items. Here too they logroll, then treat each item as mandatory to spend.
- Legislators and executives delegate lawmaking power to bureaucrats. Legislators and executives grab the executive power to control executive processes. They grab judicial power by sending cases to Constitution-violating administrative courts.
- Legislators grab the executive power to manage the execution of constitutional rules and statutes, and call this power-grab oversight. Meanwhile they shirk their legislative duty to summarily impeach to protect our life, liberty, and property. Instead they protect their distinguished colleagues’ privileges.
- Officials each claim they have to do whatever other legislators, executives, or judges say they must do. They claim they have no power, and certainly no duty, to interpret the Constitution and to only take actions that support the Constitution.
- Executives recommend to legislators that they should work together to unconstitutionally grant even more legislative, executive, and judicial powers to bureaucrats.
Progressives’ workflow likely looks familiar, even normal. But the consequences are dire. We are left with no representation that relieves us from Progressives’ despotism.
Constitutionalists’ workflow is the gold standard we should compare officials’ actions to. If we keep in mind the actions that the Constitution requires officials to take, we will see more clearly and with more specificity the exact actions Progressive officials currently take that constitute these people’s high despotism. Our very-best future legislators and executives will see this despotism clearly too.
As soon as majorities of legislators either stop themselves or get stopped by at least some others from grabbing executives’ powers, Progressive legislators’ most-destructive current despotism will end. Representatives will instead support the Constitution.
A constitutionalist executive will responsibly report how he spent the previous appropriation: how much he spent, what worked well, what worked poorly.
Constitutionalist legislators will pass the next appropriation and will promptly move on to triaging and repealing existing statutes that are unconstitutional or unwise. That is, they will take up the task that currently is their main job, and that nobody but legislators can do for us.
Government people, it’s still your move, for now. Until you no longer have a choice because we have taken our power back.
James Anthony is an experienced chemical engineer who applies process design, dynamics, and control to government processes. He is the author of The Constitution Needs a Good Party and rConstitution Papers, the publisher of rConstitution.us, and an author in Western Journal, Daily Caller, The Federalist, American Thinker, Lew Rockwell, American Greatness, Mises Institute, Foundation for Economic Education, and Free the People. For more information, see his about, media, and overview pages.
Copyright © James Anthony
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