The art for a 1999 postage stamp.
This commentary from the Wall Street Journal reflects some of what I’ve been feeling in the past few weeks. The people have gone to the polls and elected themselves a social architect. In the book Atlas Shrugged, the author details how a relatively small economic downturn balooned into the full scale collapse of civilization as the government enacted hundreds of anti-competition, redistributive give-aways, and ‘essential need’ projects ‘designed to stimulate the economy.’
Short Civics Lesson:
The office of the President is so named because his job is to ‘preside‘ over the executive branch of government. The word executive essentially is just the power to enforce laws made by the legislature, and is only granted other power in Article 2 of the Constitution. The legislative branch is granted only those powers enumerated in Article 1 of the Constitution.
But that lesson can be ignored because it is ‘widely conceded’ that the federal government can do pretty much anything it wants, whenever it wants, in any manner it wants.
I’ll just note, laws in general are good and necessary. The Bush administration made some horrible mistakes that lead to ‘John Galt’ style engineers taking positions in finance companies and applying their ingenuity to the distribution and packaging of debt, when they could have been applying their brilliance to technology, science, or even better policy. The world is a worse place because of this. But that does not justify the rampant spending of trillions of taxpayer dollars in ways that reward foolish decisions.
Hat Tip to Ryan Gleason who sent me the WSJ commentary.
