Morality-Public and Personal

What is moral? How do we define morality? If these questions make you uncomfortable, or if you’ve never really asked them, we may have an answer about our leaders in this nation. To understand and accept morality as a guiding element is the first step toward moral behavior. If one does not accept the necessity for morality, one cannot be expected to act morally, and if one does not understand the concept of moral behavior, moral life choices become coincidental or accidental. Philosophers and ethicists have grappled with definitions of morality for centuries. Shakespeare, perhaps the most celebrated of all Western writers, seemed to address the issue of an internal moral compass by penning (or quilling) the line, “to thine own self be true,” for Polonius in Hamlet. It seems to me that the first step toward questionable morality is self deception. If one is not honest about one’s motives or justifications, then the purposes of one’s actions will be distorted…divorced from reality. Okay, so how does this little preamble fit into today’s political climate? I’m glad you asked.

The impulse to run for public office seems driven by two primary motivations: self-aggrandizement and the desire to serve. Vanity in politics is as common as hair on a dog, and the politicians’ claims to be wholly dedicated to serving humanity are equally typical. At first glance the two motives would appear to be somewhat contradictory. How can a person serve him/herself and profess to sacrifice for others? I suspect, however, that the motives do not conflict. True morality is rare, but as a goal would require that our actions be noble and good. When we witness public morality, we applaud evidence of goodness and nobility. The self-deceptive aspect for politicians (and entertainers) is that they wrongly identify their desires for acclaim as a public recognition for acting morally. In other words they have calculated that their morally based actions justify their receiving praise and devotion. Their attitudes toward morality and acclaim are similar to an infant who utters a word or a toddler who uses the potty. They believe that they have earned our praises for doing what is right. Clearly, politicians and entertainers are infantile. True morality is expressed when we do what is right no matter the size of the audience, if any, or the desires of the mob. True morality is courageous and not self-conscious. It is self-effacing and extremely rare.

True morality is absolutely vital in a republic. Public morality (or imposed morality if you prefer) is the currency of a democracy. In the republic the representative must fulfill the public trust by doing what is good and what is right. She/he must be guided by moral and ethical principles while navigating the waters. In a democratic system the elected official or appointee is not necessarily influenced by absolute principles but is responsive to the citizens’ demands and whims….even if they are amoral, immoral or moral. If the politician yields to the clamoring crowd that lacks an introspective moral compass, the people will celebrate the politician’s actions. All parties will succumb to the notion that the politician’s behavior is principled and moral because he reflects the will of the citizens…the shallow-thinking, amoral public. The public construct of morality has usurped the notion of true morality. So, the self-aggrandizing vain public “servant” feels justified and moral because he/she does the people’s will, and, in turn, basks in the people’s praise. Meanwhile the republic drifts toward insignificance. The moral dream becomes a paragraph in future histories. The people and the politicians become joyful as they return to wearing skins and living in caves.

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Happy Feet

So, why call this column “Happy Feet?” As you probably know, I spent last weekend in Washington, D.C. at the CPAC convocation listening to a variety of conservatives lambast the Obama administration and wailing about the condition of our nation on a number of fronts. “Happy Feet” because except for very few exceptions the presenters leapt onto the floor of national policy and proceeded to dance around every conceivable issue. They were adept. They were graceful. They were opportunistic cowards. As an example, to my knowledge, not one speaker suggested that the federal budget be reduced by $1.5 trillion…the amount of the current year’s deficit. Even if the “expert” decided that to employ such a radical cut would be disastrous for the nation, they might have approached the problem with clarity and candor. That did not happen. The massive deficit was mentioned many times, and proscriptions such as “we must cut spending” fell off their lips like silky saliva. But never, never (within the range of my hearing) was a concrete remedy put forward. They danced and danced, the orchestra played and the iceberg destroyed the ship.

Liberals or Progressives love to tax and spend. Their justification is based on the “share the wealth” model…sort of like water seeking its own level. To advance their agenda they promise many benefits to a multitude of special interests and demographic groups. When they have the power, they usually deliver, and their voter base(s) become even more devoted to them. They perform just like we expect. No surprises…when the statists grab power, the taxpaying citizens should grab their ankles and guard their wallets and property. Meanwhile, the conservatives “tsk, tsk” as the wealth of the nation becomes absorbed by the state and personal liberties are violated with impunity. The GOP and their mouthpieces rail against the “tax and spend” Democrats, but overlook their own proclivities for excessive spending. Is there no major unconstitutional function of government that they can cut? Perhaps they are afraid of a special interest or group who would squall in pain if their favored programs were eliminated. Give us something, please, Republicans. Something concrete, something identifiable…give us something that indicates you are serious about cutting government spending and reducing the size of an overly large big government.

When in power, the democrats irresponsibly spend and tax with reckless abandon. The Nanny State grows, and our freedoms are dissolved. When they control the reins of government, the republicans cut taxes, increase subsidies, endorse new programs and pass legislative measures that undermine personal liberty. They dance and dance and dance…blissfully unaware that the music has stopped. Their happy feet tap out the same non-answers to the wondering questions from their constituents. “Yes, spending is too high, and we must cut it.” That’s great, Congressperson, how are you going to cut ONE POINT FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR? For many of us the “where you cut” isn’t nearly as important as the “will you cut?” We don’t believe you…well, I don’t believe you. I do believe that you think the spending should be dramatically reduced, but I do not believe that you have a clue as to how to do it, or if you do have a clue, you lack the courage…the guts…the will to do what must be done.

There is no more time for kicking the can down the road of irresponsibility. Elected officials must step up and make the hard choices to right our ship of state. Every facet of government involvement must be measured against its Constitutional necessity and its drain on the national treasury. Every policy, foreign and domestic, must be reviewed and either eliminated, slashed or tweaked to reconcile its value and need with the overall federal, state or local condition. There can be no sacred cows unless they are mandated by the Constitution…and if so required, they should be thoroughly vetted to assure the citizens that they are getting their money’s worth. Defense spending is an example of the over-bloated constitutional requirement. Is it absolutely necessary that the United States maintain military bases in 140 countries? Remember, Politicians, you volunteered for your job. We did not draft you. Now do it.

We implore you, we beg you…we demand that you discard your ballet slippers or tap shoes, stop dancing, and do the right thing for your country…your state or district…your community and your progeny. Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, but we refuse to allow you to dance away from reality. Face the music and join the band. The dance must end.

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Freedom Fighting

In mid-December I wrote four columns about the citizens’ reactions to an overzealous repressive government. They were: “Willful Submission”…a discussion of a nation’s meek submission to its autocratic government; “A Salvation Message” which explored the role of nullification as a remedy; “Secession as a Strategy” developed the thesis for leaving the Union if the nullification efforts were inadequate; and “Sedition Sentiment” examined the justification for active resistance when a government has clearly exceeded its mandate. While I didn’t receive a lot of feedback on those columns, I am aware that they were written before many of you began reading “Littlestuff-minoosha.” I have, however, been thinking about sedition as the final chapter. It is not,….and it cannot be the end result. Seditious activity will incur the wrath of the state apparatus, and thus, must either escalate or be extinguished.

It seems somewhat ironic to me that as this piece is being distributed, I am in Washington, D.C., among the marble and granite monuments and buildings that reflect the power of this once glorious and free nation. Even here surrounded by cherished evidences of our wonderful history, I am attempting to cope with a suffocating sense of decay. Power is palpable here, but it doesn’t feel as if it is necessarily benign. People scatter about like mice in a granary when the door is opened, and one wonders if they know what they’re doing….or is it merely a charade? They seek to justify their roles by sucking the blood of liberty from the rest of us. Political and regulatory vampires on power trips. Oh my!

One of the great strengths of the United States of America is that we have attracted freedom-loving people from every nation and culture on the planet. They have brought their traditions and their ingenuity with them as they sought liberty and opportunity. Yet the nameless faces who are toiling behind these marble walls are seeking to squeeze us into a molded “sameness.” Equal opportunity was promised at the Founding, but the government class yearns for equal outcomes. They expect us to endorse their goals, but we must resist them if we are to be free. Seeking a solution to this problem, I sought the counsel of some learned, wise men:

hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security

From the Declaration of Independence of the United States.

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Please State

Has the United States become a police state? It seems rather ironic to me that as we have the continual assaults on our Second Amendment rights, an increasing number of agencies, bureaus and task forces at all levels of government are armed and wield police powers. Pick any three-letter agency within the federal bureaucracy, and you will find a division or department that holds an investigative portfolio and is armed. If you watch any of the cop shows on television, you’ll note that a common theme is the jurisdictional tension between various police agencies when they encounter a crime. Perhaps, that little tidbit may be suggesting that there are too many police agencies stumbling over one another in their aggressive attempts to hold the American people in line.

Tuesday the Patriot Act came to the House of Representative’s floor for a short-term renewal and failed. It didn’t fall because Members of the Congress had a change of heart about the invasive nature of some of the more onerous portions of that legislation. No, it failed because the Republican Whip team cannot count. The historic tension between security and liberty, safety and freedom, is starkly represented in the Patriot Act. The powers in the Act are considered above and beyond necessary tools for traditional police work during “normal” times. The difficulty arises when defining or identifying extraordinary conditions that demand excessive power for all the enforcement agencies. As long as government has the power to declare emergencies and define when additional police action is necessary, the people’s liberty will be at risk.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorizes the government to secure “any tangible thing” that may be relevant to an investigation of terrorism. They are allowed to do so even if there is no link between the “tangible” object and potential terrorists or terrorist actions. Do you own a firearm? Are you contemplating an act of terrorism? Doesn’t matter. Theoretically they can seize your weapon under the pretense that you may consider becoming a terrorist at some point in the future. This section is ripe for abuse.

There are several other provisions of the Act that can be interpreted as threats to citizens’ rights. The fact that there is not an overwhelming collection of data that suggests those provisions have been corrupted does not prevent the potential for abuse. Power does not respect a vacuum, and people who hold power will be tempted to use it…for good purposes, they believe. Perhaps you share my concern about the political class and the bureaucracy that they have created: I may like them, I may even admire them, but no way in hell do I trust them to do what is right for my family and me. I do not trust their motives, their instincts or their judgments. We all know someone who when placed in a position of power, feels compelled to “lord” it over everyone in his sphere of operation. Multiply that attitude by the thousands and you have the bureaucrats and politicians running throughout the nation trying to protect us from ourselves. Who, pray tell, will protect us from them?

Republican inefficiency has given us an opportunity to preserve some small element of freedom. If they continue to insist that the Patriot Act is necessary for protecting the nation from terrorism, then we have been given a second bite of the apple to minimize its most odious abuses. No government agency at any level should be given carte blanche to harass the citizens of our country. No agency should be awarded unlimited powers to arbitrarily redefine what constitutes a threat. No agency should have the unconstitutional authority to confiscate my “tangible thing.”

This column was titled “Please State” because at the present time our law enforcement agencies sometimes get a warrant before their actions. In some cases the agents will knock on your door before crashing through it. The issues become more problematic when you’re driving, however, because the rules that allow for you to be stopped are less concrete. Just hang on to your “tangible thing.”

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Minus Seventeen...a guest column

Repeal the 17th Amendment.

 From The Campaign to Restore Federalism

www.restorefederalism.org

One of the fundamental presumptions of the U.S. Constitution is this: when governmental power is consolidated and unlimited it is unresponsive to the needs of the governed. The framers originally sought to prevent the overreach of government by creating an elegant framework to distribute power as widely as possible through a structured competition of natural self-interests. It is for this reason that the framers preserved the integrity of the states, these independent but united “laboratories of democracy”, and it is this federal system that the 17th Amendment (which provides for the direct, popular election of U.S. Senators) destroyed. This amendment has resulted in, as the framers predicted, a national government with influence, power and control unchecked by any political mechanism. This unlimited structure threatens the uniquely American way of life and the solvency of the national government.

The original design of the U.S. Constitution acknowledged that the several state governments were equipped better than the national government to address the vast majority of citizens’ needs. The democratically elected officials of those state governments live among the people they represent. They shop at their constituents’ stores and socialize at their homes. Unlike a national politician in Washington with millions of citizens he “represents”, state officials each have constituents that number in the tens of thousands. They are far more likely to know the people, their strengths, their problems and their sensibilities, and are therefore the appropriate representatives of the people’s most critical political desires. Assembled in the state house, these governments have collective interests and characters of their own that legitimately compete with those of the national government.

The original U.S. Constitution gave state governments a strong voice in the national government by requiring them to select U.S. Senators - to serve much like ambassadors today at the United Nations - and thus created the U.S. Congress to be a political (not judicial) venue for the competition between state government interests and national government interests. The Senate provided the state governments the necessary ability to restrict the natural inclination of the national government to expand its power. It is no coincidence that the national government began its exponential growth following the passage of the 17th Amendment, just as soon as there was no longer a competing interest that could stop it. The framers concluded that the judiciary was not the appropriate arbiter (as the courts currently imagine themselves) of the line between state and national interests, in part because the courts have a self-interest favoring a strong national government (the courts being created by Congress), and in part because the framers understood that different generations may draw that separation in different ways.

The framers understood that the people of the several states were also citizens of the nation, and as such, gave them responsive representation in the form of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Progressives that pushed for the 17th Amendment in the belief that the cure for democracy’s shortcomings is more democracy, did not address the fundamental purpose for the Senate: to protect the sovereignty of the states against the encroachment of national government into the states’ meaningful interest in addressing their people’s needs. It did not take long for the state governments, which ratified the 17th in record time, to understand the full, detrimental impact of what they had done. Consider that those in state government claim a responsibility to address questions in the areas of taxation, education, employment, disaster relief, public safety, transportation, health care, marriage, and property rights, to name but a few. Yet all of those issues, and far more, are now primarily mandated, regulated, or directed out of Washington, DC, far away from the people being impacted by those policies. While the state governments bear much of the responsibility for their citizens, they have only secondary authority to do anything about the issues they face. When federal courts decline, as they frequently do, to interpret the 10th Amendment as protecting the sovereignty of states, without a voice in the U.S. Senate the states have no recourse. Repealing the 17th would address this deficiency.

The “winner take all” mentality and the resulting bitterness that grips partisan Washington today is one direct result of the 17th Amendment. Interest groups understand that to impose one’s will on 300,000,000 Americans, one must influence one president, the selection of 5 supreme court justices, 51 (or 60) senators, and 218 representatives, a total of 275 individuals who live primarily in physical isolation, far away from those they govern. This makes the stakes extremely high. A tremendous amount of money is raised and spent on influencing 275 individuals in Washington. Repealing the 17th Amendment would devolve power away from the national government and drastically reduce the influence of interest groups. Under the original design, change at the national level required that the majorities of all the state legislatures – made up of thousands of representatives – be taken into account. The framers understood that moderate, temperate government is brought about by a multitude of competing interests. Repealing the 17th takes a major step toward restoring this balance.

At the same time, the individual’s self-interest is currently working against a repeal of the 17th. Consider recent studies showing that 52% of the U.S. population receives a significant portion of their personal income from government programs. At present, it is in the majority of citizens’ own short-term self-interest to see this flow of money grow larger and faster. Without checks on our own self-interest, we the citizens of the United States will continue to vote ourselves payments from the U.S. Treasury until our national government is financially and philosophically bankrupt. This is perhaps the most classic, and most widely understood pitfall of democracy, and strong safeguards must be restored to correct for it.

There is a mechanism in the original constitutional design that could prevent our own self-destruction, and may keep us from spending our way into total ruin. A repeal of the 17th Amendment and the resulting rise of strong, sovereign state governments is our best hope.

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