How ironic. Barak Obama promised to transform America. And, he has. Only, the tea party movement he incited is nothing like the community organizing he once did. And he certainly never meant to turn Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Aaron Klein, Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, Jerome Corsi and Michelle Malkin into nationally-known, best-selling authors.. Suddenly, millions of Americans are reading about public affairs and politics. And they are devouring a welter of well-documented chronicles connecting the political dots (all things liberal) to their dashed expectations and diminished lives.

Tax reform is one popular option. Only,its proponents seem unable to agree as to what form tax reform should take. The popular "flat tax" would cut current high rates, leave fewer brackets and end many loopholes that now favor a plethora of special pleaders. The alternative "fair tax" would replace the income tax, altogether, in favor of a national sales tax. Since it will take a 10-year ratification contest to repeal the 16^th Amendment establishing the income tax, this is planning for the long-range. And, since both plans claim to be "revenue neutral," meaning they would not reduce Washington’s total tax take, they still leave permanent tax relief a long way off. When it comes to calculating the benefits and costs of financing big government, there’s only one practical recommendation: choose your poison..

The proposed balanced-budget amendment also looks to the long-run, for much the same reason. If a two-thirds majority in both houses of congress and three-quarters of the states can be persuaded to ratify the amendment, after ten years of tumultuous debate, and if language allowing deficits (in the event of "unspecified contingencies") is not buried in the bill, annual budget expenditures may be made to match annual revenues. But, then, the plans typically envision a ten-year time horizon and save the deepest cuts for the "out" years. Well, in politics, when the deep cuts are scheduled to come later, rather than sooner, no one really expects them to come, at all. This year’s Congress cannot bind the votes next year’s legislators will cast. At any moment, prevailing conditions or what matters most to their constituents will set the policy agenda. At any rate, all legislative designs unfailingly rely on statistical projections powered mainly by guess work. Congress can only imagine (1) what next year’s interest, inflation, jobless and economic growth rates will be, (2) what revenues the IRS will raise, in tomorrow’s climate, or (3) that there will be no foreign financial crisis or successful domestic terrorist attack to alter outcomes. In the scramble for floor votes it is best to overlook the dubious assumptions and doubtful estimates that support Congress’ good intentions. But if revenues need to be raised to satisfy some constituency or another, it’s always possible to juggle economic growth projections and count the unexpected windfall that will magically flow into the Treasury’s till. In truth, the unforeseeable impact of implementing "Obamacare" renders all future fiscal forecasts dubious. And, there yet remains the daunting task of deciding which specific discretionary and entitlement programs to place on the chopping block.

Not every reform effort looks to the long-range. Owing to the recurring need to push the country ever deeper into debt and show "good faith," our leaders may try to work out some package of short-range budgetary cuts. Thus , the "cut, cap and balance plan" calls for slashing some $111 billion out of the nearly $4 trillion 2012 FY budget, alone. Okay, so how is the budget-cutting process to proceed? Should it be with broad or fine strokes?

Broad strokes are made with a cleaver. It prefers to make across-the-board cuts, putting every cabinet department on the chopping block. "Shared sacrifice, right"" But, not every function executive agencies perform and departent Congress funds performs an equally vital service. Needing to make monthly credit card payments, a financially-strapped family will not take equal sums from its, food, mortgage, medical vacation, retirement and entertainment budgets. Nor should government. It behooves a hard pressed family - or country - to think carefully about what functions it can cut and which must be kept.

Fine strokes are more discreet and made with a scalpel. This tool carves thin, line-by-line slices, whenever it finds waste, fraud, abuse, duplication. It will exhaust the discretionary side of the budget before turning to the popular entitlement allowances. But then, no constituent wants to see his benefits or exemptions eliminated. The problem with this approach is that there will be as many floor battles (and watered-down compromises) as there are lines on the budget and lobbyists on capitol Hill.

Cleaver or scalpel, the $3-5 trillion in promised cuts, spread over the next ten years pales when placed against the $45+ trillion Washington will spend in that period. Ten-year or 10% solutions will not solve anything. The short-range gambits do too little and the long-range gambles arrive somewhere between way too late and never at all. Just one or two more punishing shocks to an already-reeling economy and the country could be pushed to the edge of irreversible calamity.

This is no time for timorous reforms that deal in details or debates over issues that are essentially inessential. Nothing short of a revolutionary course correction can offer the hope of a lasting recovery. What could that possibly look like? Just Imagine.

What if it were possible to (1) identify a spending category broad enough to subsume 50%, no as much as 70% of all federal outlays and clear enough to identify every line-item link tied to that broad conceptual chain; (2) demonstrate that such programs invariably prove more harmful than helpful; and (3) challenge the very legitimacy of the full range of programs subsumed under that well-defined category?

If this were possible, Americans could send their servants to high office under crystal clear instructions: Trim and terminate these programs with all reasonable speed, year after year, session after session.

What are the odds of finding so consequential a spending area? Higher than one might imagine. But, to expose that broad category, it’s necessary to ask some basic questions. What must government do for us? And what should we be expected to do for ourselves? What exactly is government for? To quote Lt. Columbo, when can a people say to their elected leaders: "this far and no farther?"

Just about every function government performs can be placed into one of two fundamental categories. Government can serve as a PROTECTOR or a PROVIDER. In the first instance, it protects us in the enjoyment of what is already our’s - our lives, liberties, our rightfully-obtained property, our families’ safety, our national security.

Once government acts not to protect us all, but to materially assist some (invariably at others’ expense), it stops being a protector and becomes a provider. What it provides may as well be called welfare - regardless whether the beneficiaries are rich or poor, young or old, healthy or sick, union laborers, family farmers, Main Street bankers or Wall Street brokers, "needy" or not..

Since federal spending on the departments and agencies responsible for national defense, homeland security and the administration of civil and criminal justice comes to roughly $860 billion (out of total annual expenditures in excess of $3.6 trillion), it isn’t unreasonable to conclude that the remaining 75% (or roughly $2.8 trillion) is set aside for the annual support of sundry welfare services. For the sake of full disclosure, this does includes food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, No Child Left Behind, ethanol subsidies to farmers and financial bailouts.

While this is no place to trace the history of welfare in America, two questions can now be answered: (1) when did government first assume the role of Provider ? and (2) How did we go from that day to this?

The reader will probably be surprised to learn that the origins of the American welfare state date back to the 2^nd bill signed into law by America’s first President. The 1789 Tariff Act was designed to raise revenue (a power granted by the Constitution). But the 1789 law also was designed to "encourage domestic manufactures" by making competing foreign goods more expensive. Many "infant" industries profited, but others paid the price. Farmers had to sell their produce for what the market would bear but had to buy manufactured products at politically-imposed higher prices. The fall off in trans-Atlantic trade all but left seamen and seaport merchants and their ships idle at their wharfs.

In the ensuing decades legislation funding a grab bag of goodies to well-connected special interests would be enacted. At first, well-connected business interests received most of the largesse. But, if government could assist the "greedy" in the 19^th century, surely it could help the "needy" in the 20.^th.. It generally ended badly, every twenty years, or so. It is known as the "business cycle." But, strictly speaking, it was something else. Made-in-Washington booms would bust, pain would spread, mal-investments would be liquidated, in time, and the marketplace would resume its roar. But, notice, not in the lost decade of the 1930's. Never before had government’s efforts to restore prosperity been so great, and never before did the hard times last so long.

How did we get from there to here. What makes it possible to tie the nation’s first tariff law to today’s perilous state of affairs? A simple, unavoidable rule of thumb.

Once a nation decides that some of its citizens have a right, not to go out and get, but to sit still and be given,,it finds itself torn by two questions. Just who should be given, and exactly how much should they get. There’s only one way of answering that question: Politics. With the ever-rising demand for public assistance, comes an ever-ready supply (at an ever-mounting expense).

Soon, corruption corners the market, and politics becomes little more than the business of buying votes with other people’s money. All the while, average Americans withdraw in an apathy powered by cynicism. But, how reasonable is that withdrawal? Recall Margaret Thatcher’s "iron" rule: The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. And, then recall Gerald Ford, who said back in 1976. "A government that’s big enough to give you anything you want, is big enough to take everything you have.. How so? "It’s not only their prosperity, that a people will forfeit in the struggle for public assistance, but their liberty, as well." So why shouldn’t Washington tell an airline manufacturer where they can and can’t open their plant or what your children can and cannot eat?

And, we are led back to the most basic questions of all: What must government do for us? And what should we be expected to do for ourselves? We will always depend on government to be a strong protector. The human race has found no substitute for judges, jails and police, for armed forces, crack intelligence operations and criminal investigative services. Operating under a clear constitutional frame, these services afford all citizens an inestimable blessing, equal protection under law.

But it is not enough to expose welfare’s past failures or the future "unsustainablity." of so many popular welfare programs. If there is to be a serious assault on runaway spending in this country, welfare will have to be rejected in principle. Only if the idea, itself, is stripped of all pretense at legitimacy, will the much-needed phase-outs commence. The case against welfare must be pressed on moral/Consitutional grounds. And such a case can be constructed.

Those in the forefront of the struggle against "Big Government" often appeal to the country’s founding principles. They invoke the ideals of "limited government," "constitutional order," and the like. That’s not appealing, enough. As such, these precepts are too broad and vague to place clear and permanent constraints on government’s power. They do not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political functions. They do not announce the due limit of American law.

"We hold these truths to be self-evidence, 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 ."

Consider the explosive, though oft-overlooked, implication of this. If government derives its powers from "the consent of the governed," then government can claim no power that the governed never originally possessed. So, just what powers do people have that can be transferred to their political institutions?

The answer to that question lies outside the Declaration, but within the deeper set of ideas the founders borrowed from abroad. It is specifically to the fuller exposition of John Locke, that our attention must turn. It was this philosopher’s natural rights/social contract philosophy that informed the founders’ revolutionary labors. Locke begins his speculations in a state of nature, before government is formed. As the sub-title of his Second Treatise of Governent announces, his aim was to determine "the true, original, extent and end of civil government." What governent is for? And what are the limits of its rightful authority?

Locke identified four rights inherent rights with which all men are naturally endowed, rights wired into their frame at birth: (1) the right to Life is the right to live one’s life as one pleases, "without let or hindrance;" (2) this raises the corollary right of liberty, the right to do as one pleases as long as one does not violate anyone else’s equal right; (3) since man is a material creature, whose well-being requires the acquisition of food, shelter, clothing and a large assortment of goods, individuals must be allowed to go out and get, keep, use, enjoy and freely dispose of, in a word, property; and (4) since in a pre-political state of nature, the enjoyment of these rights are uncertain, every individual must be endowed with a right of self-defense - the right to protect what is his from any who would trespass on his property or violate these inherent rights.

Since, in the state of nature, the task of defending life, liberty and property is so uncertain, individuals see the need to organize into civil societies, establishing and relying on government to assure their safety and happiness. But, they do not surrender their lives liberties and property to the state. It is only to better protect them that they enter into a social contract, in the first place. What they do cede to governent is their inherent right of self-defense. They pledge not to take the law into their own hands,, not to become vigilantes, but to rely on the rule of law and the institutions of govenment to rectify all wrongs.

Governments are thus responsible for protecting the citizens in the enjoyment of their natural rights of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." It may claim the power of a protector, because it is a right those who form civil society originally possessed and so could delegate. But as no one ever had an original right to restrict another’s liberty or dispose of another’s property, government may not claim such authority. It’s not within the citizen’s power to authorize government to deprive others of what is their’s in order to materially assist any others. The powers of government, after all, are derived from powers delegated to it from the people; the people are the sole source of political authority. If they never had such a power to cede to government, no government could lay claim to such power. Locke was crystal clear on this point.

All other influences, notwithstanding, the patriots of the Revolution, the Framers of the Constitution, the Federalists who supported, as well as the Antifederalists who opposed its ratification, and the Jeffersonian Republicans who came to power in 1801 were all committed to a set of principles nowhere more fully enunciated than in the writings of John Locke. For details, see Locke in America: The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era. (available at amazon.com).

Jefferson’s long believed the Lockean principles enshrined in his immortal Declaration, merely expressed the harmonizing sentiments of his day. As it turns out, that was the problem. Sentiments can fade. They usually do. Remaining loyal to Locke meant holding government to its legitimate role as Protector , not transforming it into a "rent-seeking," vote-grubbing Provider bent on spending, taxing and borrowing its way to bankruptcy. Above all, it meant that those emotional props would have to harden into clearly-articulated constitutional supports. In language as clear and uncompromising as Locke’s, the legitimate limits of political power would have to be recast into the fundamental law of the land. Then, perhaps, all past & present efforts to "game" the system, all the "Pay-to-Play" schemes and boom-and-bust cycles, all the benefits that have gone to Americans not at all in need, might have been avoided. That didn’t happen. Nowhere in the Constitution were the fine points of Locke’s political philosophy be carefully posted. It is not enough to speak of the "blessings of liberty," or to forbid the taking of "life, liberty or property without "due process" or "just compensation." That wouldn’t do, especially when Washington was perfectly free to promote the "general welfare" or take enact legislation deeed "necessary and proper" to the carrying into execution of any other imaginable "implied" power.

It usually took time for consequences to catch up to causes, but sooner or later the country would pay a price for its fateful, philosophic omission. Protective tariffs, internal improvements, national banks, transcontinental railroads, farm subsidies, cheap money, recurring deficits, sundry panics and crashes, these were the wages for the political "sins" carelessly left by our forefathers. Only now, is the full bill coing due. If this country is to have a future, the people had better rediscover their past, fast.

So, imagine a popular rising against welfare, a righteous crusade to repeal the principle, root and branch. There is no use denying the pain the transition to a welfare-free will produce. But, it doesn’t have to be done in a day. It will take years, if not decades, to claim final success. But some happy effects will fall our way, in the meantime.

Now, this whole "preposterous "idea obviously begs a multitude of questions. Not the least of which is the little matter of figuring out what will become of those who truly cannot cope by themselves. For a response to many such questions and for a full range of arguments suitable for building a case and launching a crusade against the welfare menace, the reader is invited to read Everything You Have, (limited quantity soon to be made available from amazon.com)

Assistant Professor

Seton Hall University

Author:

Copyright © 2011 by Jerome Huyler