May

Reflections on the Declaration of Independence and Our Current Circumstances

It is a habit of mine to revisit those documents so instrumental in the organization and structuring of our country from time to time. I am an enthusiast for the archaic facts of history, as I find that it increases my understanding of how things came to be the way that they presently are. It also enables me to distinguish between the true and the false where ideological appeals are concerned.

What is remarkable to me in my most recent revisiting of the Declaration of Independence is how many parallels can be drawn between that document and the present reality of this country. The litany of complaints in that document reads like a list of objections drawn from the present in the United States.

Let’s take a look at one of those objections. “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” Ladies and gentlemen, government regulation costs us nearly $1.2 trillion a year. Our businesses pass these costs on to us in the form of higher prices and lower wages. And it’s only growing as we speak: our tax code alone results in a compliance cost of some $192 billion dollars, and it is currently over 3.5 million words in length, and on an average day, 1.5 new regulations are added to that tax code.

This isn’t confined to Republicans or Democrats. Both parties have participated in the rampant increase in the size, scope, and authority of the federal government over the past 70 years. Both parties have encouraged a growth in the voracious appetite of federal agencies for ever greater amounts of funding, which they then consume for the ostensible purposes of promoting or protecting national interests, which inevitably fall into neglect regardless.

We’ve heard how the Securities and Exchange Commission’s employees possess a proclivity for viewing pornography on the job. Small wonder, then, that our economy imploded not under the weight of regulation and oversight, but rather from the neglectful eye of overseers who were too busy watching people copulate on their computers. Therefore, these same overseers could not be bothered to tear themselves away from the carnal congress unfolding in full glory so that they might, say, investigate the FBI’s warnings of rampant mortgage fraud.

Today we have a Congress and regulatory apparatus doing everything but the one thing that might prevent a future collapse: firing the incompetent, perverted, dilettantes who violated workplace policy and wasted our money and replacing them with competent professionals who might actually investigate charges of fraud. The economic collapse was, as it turns out, entirely foreseeable, but not if your eyes were full of the offerings of Vivid Entertainment or Wicked Pictures. I am no prude. If you must watch pornography, do it on your own time in the privacy of your own home. Do not, however, do it on my dime as an employee of the federal government and expect me to be lenient or understanding when your negligence is at least partially responsible for the collapse of the world economy. The issue is not one of ensuring that banks have higher capital reserves on hand; it is instead one of ensuring that government employees tasked with oversight and enforcement are doing their jobs as opposed to viewing pornography for hours at a time while at work.

We have other reports of the Minerals Management Service employees and their tendency to use crystal meth on the job and view pornography as well. This, according to a US Interior Department report which found such behavior was included, but by no means constituted the entirety of regulatory shortcomings over at that particular agency. In addition to the drugs and the pornography, employees of the Minerals Management Service accepted gifts from the oil companies they were tasked with overseeing, and generously allowed the oil companies to sign off on their own inspections. That is, the employees of the Minerals Management Service never inspected anything. They gave the appropriate documentation to the employees of the oil rig in question, and those employees filled out the inspection sheets. No surprise that the inspection sheets indicated a flawless record in most instances.

We can perhaps understand why it is that the deepwater well operated by BP in the Gulf of Mexico is currently hemorrhaging oil into the water right now. After all, the employees of the department tasked with overseeing its compliance with basic regulatory requirements for safety and operational feasibility were otherwise occupied with pornography and the ingestion of crystal meth. It is also no surprise that several other wells have been capped after a review which found that they possessed multiple design flaws which could have led to similar operational failures.

We pay on the order of $1.2 trillion to comply with federal regulations, and we paid an additional $3.518 trillion in 2009 to get these results. That’s $4.7 trillion, or nearly a third of our GDP. I don’t know how one could credibly argue that we need more spending when the staggering amount of spending we already have has failed to produce a result which works. No amount of spending will wipe out a culture of corruption that is ingrained within our government from the top to the bottom. You can’t give individuals who watch pornography at work and use drugs on the job more money to do their jobs and expect that issues will magically be resolved by your beneficence.

We have enough government spending in this country. In point of fact, we have more than enough spending. What we do not have is a return on our investment, and the reason we do not have it is that we have allowed our government to metastasize to a point where its bureaucrats and employees, who happen to be our employees, do not feel as though they are culpable for their actions. Until that changes, we will continue to have widespread fraud in our markets and ecological catastrophes in our public waters.

I have no objections to unions or unionized workplaces. As a staunch believer in the First Amendment and the right of individuals to associate freely, I have no real issue with workers organizing to get themselves a better deal where matters of compensation are concerned. Do I believe that they should be able to compel everyone who enters employment in a specific workplace to join them? No. Free association goes both ways, and making employment contingent on mandatory membership in a union is a violation of basic individual rights and liberties. I don’t care one whit about the practical implications for unions. Rights are not suspended for purposes of pragmatism, at least not legitimately.

I also do not believe that union membership should keep you from culpability for your actions. If you watch pornography at work, you ought to be fired immediately. If you use drugs on the job, or come to work intoxicated, you ought to be fired immediately. I have no problem with a process being enacted to ensure fairness and ferret out slander from truthful accusations. But in the event that you are found to have engaged in such behavior on the job, especially if you are a taxpayer employee, and government employees are taxpayer employees, you ought to be fired.

We have come to a point in our society where failure is incentivized. Far from suffering rightful culpability, federal employees receive a great deal of leniency and many chances at redemption. Not surprisingly, we have lax enforcement and a record of incompetence and corruption within government bureaucracies. This culture of corruption is widespread. It has stretched into our private sector as well, as the financial sector has come to understand over the past 30 years that if they fail, they will be bailed out and made whole by the federal government. The costs have been high, some $23.7 trillion so far in the case of the TARP bailout.

With each failure, our elected leaders and unelected employees insist that the answer is more. More money. More resources. More power. More offices and departments. The only things they want less of are accountability and oversight of their own performances and results.

In closing, I will leave you with these words, from the Declaration of Independence: …–That to secure these rights (Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness), Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just consent from 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 foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” With a government whose direct and indirect cost to the economy consumes nearly a third of our GDP, and a national debt which currently exceeds $13 trillion and which has an additional obligation of $2.5 in IOUs to Social Security, I would say that our government has become destructive to the security of our right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of our own Happiness. It is time to institute a new government, and to re-organize its powers and re-establish its foundations and principles in such a form which shall be most likely to effect our safety and our happiness.