The View From 1776

In his Wall Street Journal editorial essay titled Earmark Nation, Daniel Henninger notes that nearly all politicians have become ear-markers.  Some like Senator Byrd and Congressman John Murtha are in the really big leagues, but all local elections turn to some degree, not on which candidate will be the most prudent in dealing with the nation’s fiscal future, but on who promises to bring home the most pork.

As Mr. Henninger notes, one driver of the phenomenon is the awareness that, if our elected representative doesn’t grab some money, someone else’s representative will grab it.  Under the modern welfare state, there is no benefit in a locale or its representative standing for a tighter budget and fiscal prudence.  The inherent nature of the welfare state drives the legislative process to ever greater excesses and makes us all uncouth hogs scrambling for slop at the public feeding trough.

The earmark excesses of individual legislators like Senator Byrd or Congressman Murtha, however harmful, are small potatoes compared to the huge welfare-state entitlements programs that began with Social Security in 1935.  Over the decades those programs, expanding to include Medicare, Medicaid, prescription drug benefits, and potentially a National Socialist health insurance program, have racked up unfunded obligations to American citizens (as well as illegal immigrants) that dwarf our GDP.

Those financial-strangulation programs could not have become today’s frightening reality before President Franklin Roosevelt imposed socialist collectivism upon the nation with his 1930s New Deal.  Before the start of the New Deal under Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce and then as President in 1928, the only sorts of nationwide programs at the Federal level were grants of public lands to foster the expansion of railroads to facilitate the westward expansion of the nation.  Apart from such land grants, the Federal government left road building, canal building, dam and river levee construction, and similar activities entirely to the states and to local governments.  If the locals were not prepared to fund them, then the programs were not regarded as worth public support.

There was thus a natural check and balance mechanism, arising from the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the Constitution, preventing one-size-fits-all socialistic, bureaucratic programs that could, at one shot corrode public morality and fiscal prudence.  Programs were all of a smaller, local scale that allowed for trial and error and, all importantly, for local ingenuity to fit solutions to specific local problems.

Even as late as the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society entitlements expansion hammered more nails in the nation’s fiscal coffin, states were still viewed as the laboratories of innovation and the source of governmental excellence.

President Obama’s administration has returned the nation to the New Deal entitlements speed track and is set to surpass every record for heedless deficit spending ever established, anywhere in the world.  Whatever the administration does - from spending trillions to reduce future global temperatures a fraction of a degree to nationalizing the nation’s healthcare - will affect everyone with a single tax blast.  There will be no opportunity for local experimentation and trial-and-error implementation, because the President’s radical left-wing advisors view local governments as stupid and see private businesses as criminal enterprises.