Self-Limited Governments

Our rights are secured when power limits power.

The American Colonies had total taxes of just 1% to 2% of GDP. This freed the colonies’ voluntary economy to leap way up from subsistence level to per-capita purchasing power that exceeded that in Great Britain by 68%.

The founders designed the Constitution to further this freedom.

Running on Forward Momentum

To keep life, liberty, and property secure from governments, governments were to be self-limited. State-government people, representatives, senators, executives, and judges would each have limited powers. Each would have powers to defend their boundaries against the others.

The new governments still were small. Through 1913, apart from during major wars, total national, state, and local spending was just 3% to 8% of GDP.

With governments small, the voluntary economy thrived. Property rights were the world’s best. Invested savings compounded, growing exponentially. Because this investment grew, productivity and wealth grew.

Incomes were lower, and charity went far, as always. When people in the voluntary economy are coerced to pay taxes, they have to pay additional associated costs, and they also end up forgoing additional value-adding work. The net result is that when people pay and forgo a total of $1.00, the government nets $0.61, and the government leaves recipients just $0.20.

In contrast, when people in the voluntary economy donate $1.00, the median collection costs leave recipients a full $0.91. Recipients also get role models, life skills, and work skills.

The founders were leaders, and they counted on most leaders to limit their own actions in government. That was a major error. Even the founders didn’t limit their own actions to what was constitutional.

The Federalist Party under George Washington soon violated the Constitution’s enumerated power to coin money and the Constitution’s lack of an enumerated power to print fractional-reserve paper money. In the process, the Federalists also violated the Constitution’s protection of property rights. They did all this by enacting a single statute that chartered a national bank and empowered the bank to create money.

This let crony bankers not do the work of collecting deposits and paying deposit interest, and still receive loan interest the bankers hadn’t earned. The resulting money creation and debt creation caused inflation losses. Also, the resulting money creation and debt creation caused debt-driven government money error-cycle losses.

Further, the founders generally looked down on using constitutional powers against other government people. This was, and is, the most-tyrannical error.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison started out leading the Federalists’ slavery-continuing but otherwise radical-libertarian caucus. Jefferson and Madison each advised President Washington that the national bank would be unconstitutional.

Soon afterward, Jefferson and Madison started the first Republican Party and gained power, and suddenly changed to governing as so-called moderates. These Republicans didn’t repeal the national bank after all.

Jefferson also never vetoed anything. The founders created a tradition of almost never vetoing because of policy. (To their credit, at least they did veto if in their own judgment they considered a bill unconstitutional.)

Andrew Jackson, a Revolutionary War veteran but not a founding leader, finally used the veto power more generally. Jackson famously ignored longstanding precedents of past congresses, presidents, and a supreme court and instead, based on his own judgment that a later national-bank bill was unconstitutional, vetoed the bill. And Jackson didn’t veto the bill in the same way that James Madison had vetoed an earlier national-bank bill, on narrow grounds that Congress could then quickly reverse. Jackson vetoed this later national-bank bill on broad grounds that long endured. Jackson and his successor Martin Van Buren ushered in a sustained plateau of smaller government.

The plateau started under these slavery-continuing but otherwise-libertarian initial Democrats. The plateau continued under the slave-freeing but war-escalating big-government Republicans. The plateau continued after the war under the continuing influence of the small-government Democrats. The plateau finally ended when the Democrats fundamentally transformed internally, leaving no small-government major party remaining, in 1894.

Ratcheting Up the Takings and Control

From 1894 forward, with only brief interruptions, Progressives who defy the Constitution have had an iron grip on Congress and the presidency. Total national, state, and local government spending has been ratcheted up by wars and by peacetime spending on government cronies such as on health-payment providers, and now is 43% of GDP.

This largely-unconstitutional direct spending, and the fully-unconstitutional concomitant regulations with their substantial indirect compliance costs, both have been available to be grabbed in the first place only because of the voluntary economy’s opulence. Invested savings, despite being held down to well below their full potential, have continued to compound over time, which has helped drive productivity further up. The voluntary economy has been a rich nutrient source that has left next to no limit on the size of our governments throughout the Progressives’ century.

Progressives’ positioning permeates our historical understanding and our politics.

Progressives’ Constitution-defiance is marketed to us as cooperative behavior just like the positive behaviors we benefit from in our own lives: customers’ and businessmen’s voluntary cooperation, and family members’ prosocial behavior.

The only government behavior that actually is prosocial—that is, that secures people’s rights, leaving people free to voluntarily cooperate—is when government people limit government people. Self-limiting governance that’s truly prosocial is resisted near-religiously by the Progressive majorities of our current government people from both parties.

Progressives endlessly promote Constitution-defiance by hiding it in plain sight using language that sounds positive: regulating, security, care, government oversight, curbing executive overreach, not do-nothing government, starting a conversation, coming together, keeping the government running, making investments, stimulating the economy, making good deals, getting things done, working together, bipartisanship, protecting invented “rights” (which are disguised favors to crony voting blocs at everyone else’s expense).

Needed: Limiting Actions

Progressives aren’t going away. Inevitably, people’s genuine rights to life, liberty, and property must be secured through conflict.

The way to make political change produce good results, as shown by early America and by today’s former Soviet-bloc nations, is to make political change fast and extensive.

When fast and extensive change is for the better, this builds the support needed to overcome government cronies.

When fast and extensive change is for the worse, it’s best that it’s fast and extensive because that makes it plainly noxious, which ensures pushback. This pushback ends up producing helpful change for the better.

The good changes we need must come partly from government people staying within their boundaries, limiting themselves; and mostly from government people defending their boundaries, limiting other government people:

1. Executives must not execute unconstitutional statutes and opinions. Executives must wait for legislators to pass constitutional laws, and meanwhile must not empower unconstitutional regulators by leading regulators and by going along with regulators. Presidents must wait for congressmen to advise on treaties, write rules-of-engagement cards, and declare war.
2. Executives must use the executive power to provide unitary accountability for organizing governments under the Constitution, nominating and laying off, setting priorities, determining line-item budgets, and setting implementation schedules.
3. Vice presidents must enforce constitutionally-required simple-majority voting in senates.
4. Executives must veto bills that are unconstitutional. Currently, nearly all bills are unconstitutional.
5. Congressmen must repeal unconstitutional statutes. Currently, nearly all statutes are unconstitutional. This action is needed to provide the adequate defensive resistance and maximum strength that prevent war.
6. Congressmen must write rules-of-engagement cards, and must declare war when war is needed to secure our rights and when we’re prepared to destroy the aggressors’ governments. This will further help to prevent war.
7. Congressmen must unilaterally end trade restrictions except restrictions that limit war by not helping to build up directly-offensive enemy governments like China’s.

Our rights are secured and our potential can be achieved only when our governments are limited. The only adequately-limited governments are self-limited governments.