Lessons from the new century: What government must not have the power to do

It will be my endeavor to keep this brief and focused, because my main purpose is to introduce a way of thinking that is antithetical to what many people now assume government must be and do.  This is necessary because those assumptions fatally hinder us in all our attempts to throw off the juggernaut of the administrative state.

The central reason for proposing this way of thinking is to construct a framework for a new constitutional convention.  I have zero interest in using anyone’s current buzzwords or specific definitions for this process: I mean by it that a convention like the one that began in 1787 occurs again, and modifications are made to the existing U.S. Constitution.  The purpose of such modifications would be to impose restraints on government that have been gutted since 1789, or whose necessity was not foreseen when the Constitution was first written.

I don’t have specifically-crafted amendments to propose.  That would be putting the cart before the horse.  What I have here is a case that rethinking what we expect of government must come first, and that we badly need to rethink what we expect of government.  Our failure to do so is killing us.

The root of this problem doesn’t lie in the original work done by America’s Founders.  That work was the best and most remarkable such effort in human history, and we need not tinker with its original intent.  Its original intent was in every way to limit the scope and development of government, and that is what we should continue to want.

The root of the problem is the essential idea of progressivism that so-called “expertise” should take decisions about their own lives out of the hands of the people, and that government should on this premise arbitrarily manage more and more activities of human life to secure outcomes desired by the “experts.”

In its essence and operation, progressivism functions as a religion.  It claims for itself revelation about a higher good – an unreviewable quantity we are morally required to accept on any topic – and posits that limiting government denies us outcomes ordered according to that higher good.

But instead of actually being a prior-existing set of moral beliefs, which government can be required to honor in some of its arrangements and priorities, the “progressive” element of progressivism is its purpose of instituting different beliefs not already held by the people.  The attempted institution of different beliefs is deemed to be “progress.”  (Rejecting the social construct of slavery is often used to advocate for progressivism, but progressivism had nothing to do with getting rid of slavery.  The timeline alone confirms that, but in ironic fact, slavery cannot exist as an institution without an administrative state enforcing it.  That disjunctive condition of an America striving for limited government, while trying to accommodate an unlimited concept of government that acted arbitrarily against a whole segment of the population, was untenable.  It nearly destroyed the Union, and could only be resolved by removing the arbitrary evil itself.)

Moreover, a progressive administrative state has never delivered on its political promises.  The problems it purports to address through arbitrary administration – through regulatory mandates, prohibitions, spending – not only don’t go away; they just get bigger and bigger by the decade, according to the reckoning of the “experts.”

No loss of freedom, no cost in burdens on the taxpayers, is ever enough to finally yield the promised outcomes of benefits to society.  The outcomes remain always out of reach.  Every loss of freedom and every regulatory and spending cost is pocketed and moved on from.  The people are not just encouraged but taught, and eventually ordered, to forget that we’ve actually been addressing the same problems for decades with “expertise” and management.

We no longer live in freedom, as a result.  People’s free choices are not the problem today.

The progressive government management is the problem.  There isn’t one single “capitalist” transaction today, for example, that is not already regulated by dozens of government agencies and used for political rent-seeking.  Not one.  There is no such thing as “capitalism” having an effect on us; there is only government regulation and political exploitation of heavily managed economic transactions affecting us.  College sophomores are ill-taught on this matter, and have been for years.  In most schools, they are never taught about the overweening reality of already-existing regulation and mandates.

This state of governmental affairs is not what the Founders had in mind.  They saw quite clearly the moral hazard posed by what the Declaration of Independence calls the British king’s “swarms of officers”:  “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass [sic] our people, and eat out their substance.”  The hazard is that such arrangements are never temporary, and are held to no standard of performance other than perpetuating their usefulness as arbitrary enforcement and collection agents for the central government.

Growing the dozens of agencies happened first, as over the last century various new technologies and theories of expertise in “public management” produced enthusiasms for those agencies and their charters.  It was at the end of the century, which had started in earnest in the 1910s, that Americans began to understand how the swarms of officers they had signed up for could be used against them.  One day, it seemed, we looked up and most of our freedom was gone.  A government chartered and equipped over the course of decades finally decided to use its power in ways that were too onerous, too alarming, too enslaving to any longer escape notice.

It is sad and pathetic that extremely over-administered younger generations imagine themselves to be at risk from the attacks of “freedom,” when they haven’t lived a day in their entire lives in the freedom Americans once had.

But if the course of our nation is to be righted again, it is imperative that we deal with that problem.  And the best way to deal with it – the quintessentially American way – is to look at it as a problem of articulating realistic, good-faith expectations about government (i.e., not mere ideological or aspirational proclamations), and designing the arrangements of government to meet those expectations.

Quintessentially, again, that will be about two faces of a coin: what government must do, and what it must not do.  We need to agree on a philosophy of government that applies the original premises of our Founders to lessons we have learned in the “Information Age.”

The key original premises are two.  First, government exists to secure a certain very limited but far-reaching number of rights for its citizens.  This is what government must do:  secure those rights.  Life, liberty, and equal access to opportunity – not to outcomes, but to opportunity – are the main ones, and arguably the only ones.

The other face of the coin is what government must not do.  The Bill of Rights is a historically amazing statement of that concept.  The core meaning of constitutionalism is found in it.  Government must not do what it is constitutionally prohibited from doing, no matter how hard transient political factions maneuver to wield government in prohibited ways.

Thinking aids for addressing the fundamentals

I won’t be proposing here a specific set of axioms for the “next constitutional convention.”  That must come later.

But I believe the axioms have to derive from a common perspective on what government has any business doing – and it’s on the latter point that we have strayed, inch by inch, a very long way from the first Constitutional Convention’s healthy, ground-breaking view of the matter.

I would group the issues into at least two categories.  The first we might call our view of what is made possible – for government or any other entity with sufficient power – by shifts in technology, the knowledge gained by “science,” and the spread of information, both to humans and through or into the systems that serve us.

For brevity, I’ll refer to this as the information phenomenon.  Here is my basic proposition on it.  Cumulative changes in capability over the last 150 years have given us a sense that because we understand more, we can control more.  Imagining ourselves able to control more, we have created charter after charter for government agencies to take a current “understanding” of how our world operates and administer mandates and prohibitions, ukases that coerce human beings, to secure specified outcomes.

Examples abound, including things like the narratives of “fighting climate change”; performing “large landscape management” in which we posit that we are taking epoch-level measures to preserve “ecosystems” by trying to fence off prairie chickens and smelt fish or regulate transient puddles of water; and recently – jarringly – trying to force billions of people to adopt a lifestyle of receiving unending “vaccines” on an unprecedented schedule, as if the option didn’t exist of leveraging less-intrusive treatment and the human immune system to defeat a new virus, rather than adjusting our entire lives and future to it.

Invoking all of these things, and many others, has produced, even in America, a dramatic change in the relationship of human beings to their government.

But my point is, that does not have to be.  We don’t have to accept it, any more than the American colonists of the 1770s and 1780s had to accept that the technology allowing routine, scheduled visits from King George III’s troops meant the colonists should be subject to gun confiscation and taxation without representation.

These alterations in man-state relations have significantly and negatively affected the rights government is supposed to protect:  life, liberty, the property and opportunity elements of what the Declaration calls the “pursuit of happiness.”

The first two enterprises, “fighting climate change” and “large landscape management,” are on a career of completely negating property and opportunity rights.  All three examples – though the first and third most particularly – threaten life and liberty.  We might certainly add longer-running policies like government advocacy for and support of abortion and welfare dependency, which purport to operate as systematic, rationally-conceived ways to address poverty.

That’s where our thinking has to start.  On the “two faces of the coin” model, government should (a) protect our rights from anyone attempting to wield changes in technology and common views of knowledge and competence against those rights; and government should (b) be restrained from making such attempts itself.

But it doesn’t, and it isn’t.

It is a genuine emergency of government power – power being abused – that instead of protecting our rights and living within proper restraints, government today is the worst arbitrary, unrestrained abuser of our rights.

The second category, while it significantly overlaps the first is some ways, is a separate facet of the abuse of government power.  It has to do with a Marxist-era phenomenon of collective manipulation of the people against each other.  We may refer to it as the collective manipulation phenomenon.

Examples include the infrastructure of income tax, which has been used incessantly from Day One to set us against each other and create a whole host of new crimes and new political footballs (e.g., the idea of “fair share” taxation as a means of managing an unquantifiable condition of “fairness,” instead of just collecting the taxes to pay for government); government having opinions on people’s sexual practices, such that it enforces condoning those practices on the entire population; and government using social mores in general as a basis for declaring threats to society, and creating excuses for intruding into people’s private homes, seizing children from parents, and proclaiming categories of people unemployable.

There are many, many more examples along these lines.  The divisive resentments fostered by “critical race theory,” as it translates to classroom instruction and politics, constitute a huge batch of them.

Yet there should be no such things as government agencies, especially at the federal level, with the authority and power to vilify ideas and groups of people and ruin lives over these elements of the human condition.

Rather, we have the right to have our lives, liberty, opportunity, property, and moral equality before the law protected against such attempts.  Government should protect us against them, and government should be restrained from making those attempts itself.

Due-outs

What I want people to think about is what the Framers of the U.S. Constitution thought about, in convention assembled, from 1787 to 1789:  how to turn this principle in its essential aspects into constitutional guarantees and a relevant design for government.

Those Framers thought in a different time.  They didn’t foresee either of the phenomena I’ve outlined here; the closest was probably their understanding (much better and fresher than ours) that it’s terribly divisive for the state to take sides in religion.  They were well-versed in the religious wars of the 200-odd years preceding their time.  Social division and vilification are not new; what the Framers didn’t foresee was a quasi-“scientific” philosophy like Marxism generating its own pattern of collectivist thought-enforcement and demographic demonization.  They didn’t foresee how technology could amplify the effects of that to a truly terrible level of inescapability.

We should come out of a next constitutional convention both wiser about the hazards of new-era enthusiasms (technology, Marxism, progressivism, the delusions of information arrogance) and with an idea of government that repudiates them, and resists giving them a seat at the Constitution’s table.

One major example of what I predict as the outcome is drastically eliminating government executive agencies and setting nearly insuperable limits on recreating them.  But there are bound to be other features of a plan to reinforce guarantees of rights, and set effectively unbreachable constitutional limits.  What we cannot dispense with in this process is pondering anew, at the same basic level our Founders did, what we expect government to do for us.

Ignoring the heavy thinking about what government really exists for is what gets us into trouble.  All the myriad human issues and topics we disagree on are going to come and go.  There’s no stopping that.  Disagreement on a scrolling list of issues is inevitable.

But the only way to be fortified against abuse of government power is to agree on what government is for.  Government is not a suitable or proper vehicle for addressing most of what we’ve handed over to it today.

We need to be able to say that government is not for “redistributing income”; that it is not for changing the public’s mind about sexual mores or parental rights and responsibilities; that it is not for continually redefining “race relations” so that “racism” never ends; that it is not for imposing a single way of thinking about all “social issues” on 330 million people.

Our government must reflect this premise – that there are numerous things it isn’t suited for, and very dangerous when used for – in as many dimensions as necessary to keep it from violating its original, proper, and most basic charter.

This is work we have to do.  There is no such option as merely reverting to the conditions of public thought and dialogue as they existed in 1789.

Powerful trends have altered our civilization’s mindset since then.  They have to be answered, put in their place, defeated in their attempt to rob us of moral value, dignity, rights, and virtues.  We have to reestablish why government must protect certain rights, and must also be restrained from violating them.  Since we have manifestly failed to make government continue those obligations under the assault of the last 150 years, we have to reestablish what structural elements are necessary for government to resume doing what it’s supposed to.

Long-time readers won’t be surprised that I consider the prayer practices of the original Constitutional Convention indispensable to any future one.  We can’t do this alone.  But we don’t have to.  We do have to acknowledge that, if any reset toward constitutionalism and liberty is to prosper, it is necessary to do it.

Feature image:  The Thinker; Auguste Rodin, 1904. Wikipedia.