Or so too many people think, nearly enough for a voting majority that would fulfill de Tocqueville’s prophesy:

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Fortunately, to back safely and permanently away from the edge of the cliff, we need only allow for true capitalism to thrive and to replace the crony capitalism that so many people confuse it with. Crony capitalism feeds on greed.   True capitalism and truly free markets, defeat it.

Continue reading at Forbes Opinions…

What’s it going to take for government to get serious about our financial condition and long-term economic health? New legislation, authored by politicians with a different view of what government can and can not do, and what it should and should not do.

Enter, Jeff Flake.     Continue reading at Forbes Opinions…

Continue reading at Forbes Opinions…

Continue reading, at Forbes Online…

Continue reading at Forbes Opinions…

Continue reading at Forbes Opinions…

“If you were an entrepreneur, or a business owner or manager with the ability to start large new initiatives, perhaps ones requiring large numbers of new employees, in the face of the above legislative uncertainty, would you dare proceed?”

The resulting economic lockup, and the trillions of private capital sitting in fear on the sidelines, has become the story of the day.

Predicting this story was not difficult, due to the nature of The Machine itself.  Driven by a lust for power, fueled by environmental extremism, economic illiteracy, and class warfare, and financed by a self-serving cycle of union cronyism, there can only be one conclusion:  The Machine is antithetical to the founding principles that made this country great, and can only produce seizure.   Here’s how it breaks down:

A Lust for Power

This is the core principle behind every Big Government scheme that has ever been devised.   It is the reason that Health Savings Accounts have not been promoted instead of Obamacare.   It is the reason that Keynesian “stimulus” is still the statist’s preferred economic weapon.  It is the reason why all fifty states are not Right To Work states.   Simply put, the programs of Big Government exist to perpetuate the power and influence of those in charge, with no regard of their effects to their constituencies.    Under this worldview, any failure of policy can be traced back to a lack of financing or scale.

Environmental Extremism

With the hoax of human-caused global warming now fully exposed as a funding-perpetuation scheme, it is nothing short of criminal that sweeping, multi-hundred billion dollar legislative initiatives based on faulty science are still being promoted.   But again, if power and control are the real objective, rather than protecting the environment, with the help of a complicit media, such inconvenient truths can be brushed off.

Economic Illiteracy

In an environment where high schools and colleges rarely require any kind of economic education, combined with an increasing disregard for our Constitution, our public policies suffer accordingly.   Policies devised by such economic illiterates that mathematically cannot work can be sold via Teleprompters to a large portion of the public that is ill-equipped to challenge them.   We are now reaping what we have sown.

Class Warfare

Following a divide and conquer strategy, the statists seek to pit some groups in society against others.   Given the mathematical impossibility of financing an ever-enlarging state, the promoters of Big Government seek their life blood from “the rich”.    Economic illiteracy plays a big role here, in that the critical role the rich play in financing the economy, and indeed, in financing the very schemes of Big Government, is never discussed.   Big Government needs the money of the rich, so they must be demonized in an attempt to motivate the rest of society to expropriate and redistribute their assets.

Government Intervention, Job Destruction and Lost Government Revenues

As more and more intervention takes place based on the fallacies of the above, job destruction can be the only result, as the real creators of jobs, entrepreneurs, decide that taking a risk to create a job is simply not worth it.    Furthermore, those with large amounts of assets, “the rich”, engage in what Ludwig von Mises called a “flight to the real”:  fearing that the value of financial wealth can be manipulated by government policy, people seek tangible assets instead, like commodities and collectibles.   These assets wind up creating no new wealth.   As the job engine slows and corporate and individual revenues fall, government’s share of those revenues falls in sympathy.

Public Sector Unions, Calls for Tax Increases, Mandatory Union Dues and Political Donations

Rather than recognizing the root causes, class warfare groups, often funded by Public Sector Unions, such as New York’s Working Families Party, attempt to make up the lost revenues by Calls for Tax Increases.   Never mind that such tax increases never produce the projected revenues (as the economic illiterates fail to acknowledge the power of incentives).   And here we enter an entire mini-machine of destruction.

The unions, with their mandatory dues, take their considerable resources and via Political Donations, promote politicians that will keep The Machine in action.   The unions have their own Lust for Power, as the union helps only itself in the aggregate, and cannot bring about any net positive benefit for the majority of their members.   Their very presence reduces the wages of the capable at the expense of the incapable, and often reduces to a game of nothing more than a parasite trying to keep its host alive.

Unions wouldn’t possibly support such commonsense legislation as Right To Work, because it is an existential threat to their entire machine.   But the fact that such legislation would even been necessary, that we have to affirm the right for an employer and an employee to voluntarily enter into a mutually beneficial economic arrangement, indicates just how much damage The Machine has already done to the economic mindset in this country.   Knowing how this truth can not stand the light of day, unions instead attempt to hide their legislative motives behind innocuous sounding names like The Employee Free Choice Act (which actually has nothing to do with making choices freely).

In all, The Machine creates an environment ripe for corruption, as the stakes are very high.   It is said that people rob banks “because that is where the money is”.   In Big Government, with crony-capitalism running amok, it is well worth the lobbying effort to attempt to rig the game in your favor.  This in turn fuels cynicism about government itself, causing a large percentage of voters to tune out.

Breaking the Machine

Fortunately, the Machine can be stopped in its tracks, first by recognizing its parts, as I’ve done here.  But more importantly, the politicians that support this Big Government vision can be held accountable, and replaced as necessary.   Throughout their terms, regardless of what they’ve promised, their day-to-day votes are out of our control.   For one day, every two years, the tables are turned.

You know what to do.

Free Subscription ~ Follow on Twitter

[This essay was originally entitled "Lessons from Grand Central Station", until several readers pointed out that the correct name is Grand Central Terminal.  It was an error that I could not let stand.  The permalink (URL) reflects the original title so as to not break existing references. -- Author/Admin]

Every weekday morning, trainloads of people are dumped into New York’s Grand Central Terminal and sent on their way.  Thousands per hour traverse the huge main room as they make their way to their desired subway stations, taxi stands and exits in all directions.  Arteries of traffic spontaneously form and disperse — you can join one that’s going in your general direction, get swept along its path and then step out at your stop.   The human pathways will intersect each other with the precision of a champion marching band.   Collisions between any two people amongst the throngs are rare, even amongst those who clearly don’t know where they’re going.

What’s most remarkable about the above is that no one manages this process.   There are no human traffic cops in white gloves waving some people on and telling others to stop.  There are no ropes herding commuters one way or another.    There are no rules dictating which path you must take to get from point A to point B.   The room manages itself, based on essentially one unwritten rule:  common courtesy. That is to say, you can’t charge through the crowd like a running back, stiff arming people as you go.   What might initially appear as chaos is instead a model of simplicity and efficiency.

Many of the most beautiful structures and creations in the world are also models of simplicity.  Most people will recognize

E=MC²

as Einstein’s deceptively simple “energy equivalence” formula, which explains some of the most profound physical relationships in the universe.   Many others have encountered the classic Mandelbrot image, which can be described by a set of mathematical equations totaling about 1/2000th of the length of Obamacare.

Not designed by Congress

Sadly, it seems as though simplicity is politically incorrect.

Witness the bewildering sizes of recent pieces of legislation, or attempted legislation, drafted in true “we’ve really got it this time” fashion.    Obamacare tips the scales at 2000+ pages. The recent financial reform bill is 3000+ (with the original Glass-Steagall act, whose re-birth some people are calling for, weighing in at a paltry 34 pages).   Even the government’s response to the tragically ongoing BP oil spill has been one of triangulation and determined-complexity.   Get some supertankers to siphon off the leaking oil?   Nope.   Help Louisiana Gov. Jindal to build some temporary barrier islands along parts of the coastline?  No sir.  Keep a boot on the throat of BP — hey, that’s a killer sound bite!  Let’s go with that!

It’s interesting to instead think of how brief, yet sweeping, some alternatives might be:   Take financial regulation:   How about a few pages, summarized by:  “You are free to fail; proceed at your own risk”. Or health care:   “A true insurance policy, provided by the private sector, can cover you for catastrophic-but-unlikely events.  You can cover all other expenses, just like any other consumer good.” Energy policy?   “The government will enforce property rights but otherwise has no dog in this hunt.  We encourage (verbally only) all entrepreneurs to build the better mousetrap and let the world beat the path to your door.” International trade:   “We welcome the best and cheapest suppliers, as defined by their customers, to provide them with goods and services.   To levy taxes and tariffs on imports is to commit an act of war against our own citizens.”

What each of these “solutions” have in common, besides simplicity and less attractive press conferences, is something which an ever-growing government seems determined to choke off:  personal responsibility.    What each of the government “solutions” substitutes instead, is hubris.

Indeed, the hubris of government is that multi-thousand page bills can actually accurately describe and account for the complexity of the real world, where hundreds of millions of economic actors interact in virtually infinite combinations (see also, the Mandelbrot above).  By contrast, any good engineer will tell you that simplicity and reliability go hand in hand.  Remember the KISS principle?  (Even the rock band of the same name has profited handsomely from that.)  How many times have we seen “fewer (or no) moving parts” as part of a sales pitch?  Computer hard drives are being replaced by flash memory for this very reason.   A software engineer might tell you that the fastest code is the code that is never called.   Likewise, the most productive programmer is the one that solves the problem with the fewest commands.    Complexity is the arch-enemy of reliability, and its corollary, predictability.     Think about this:  A system with 50 required parts, each one having 95% reliability, has an overall reliability of .95⁵⁰, or barely 8%!

It should be no surprise, therefore, that our telephone book sized pieces of legislation fail to hold up to their lofty promises.   Betting on their ultimate ineffectiveness is like the proverbial “shooting fish in a barrel”.   In trying to capture one detail after another, they bake failure in to their very core.

Back in the real world, such legislative endeavors have a perverse effect.   This past Friday, CNBC aired some extraordinary comments by Steve Wynn, Chairman of Wynn Resorts.   He basically echoed sentiments expressed at this web site many months ago, and lamented on the lack of clarity and predictability of the environment within which business must operate.     In this adminstration’s lust for addressing every nook and cranny of our economy, and in their belief that they can legislate their way to greatness, they have instead legislated paralysis.  And the Steve Wynn’s of the world, the risk takers, the true job creators, are expending their productive energies in far away places like Macau, rather than in our own backyard.

If one wonders why job creation in this country is below expectations, perhaps examining those expectations in the context of such legislative complexity is in order.    Where Grand Central’s unmanaged and unregulated system allows solutions to spontaneously ebb and flow as needs require, Washington instead is criss-crossing our economy with crowd-control ropes and tangling our economic actors into knots.

Sign up for a Free Subscription

Witness the birth of ObamaCare, and the justifiable rage that has ensued as a result of the state taking one sixth of our private economy into its control.   In the days before the historic vote, note that not even the New York Times could produce a poll saying that a majority of Americans wanted this bill to become law.  Most remarkably, as of March 29th, a stunning 54% of likely voters would see it repealed.   In morphing their supposed mandate for “change” as pertaining to healthcare and health insurance policy into a supposed mandate for this bill, Obama’s operatives reached their peak (thus far) in disingenuousness.

The rage exists simply because our representatives did not represent.   Instead, they blatantly misrepresented.   They blatantly insisted in getting this bill passed before Easter recess where they would have been more directly confronted by their constituents.   For this bill, it was literally now or never.

In the end, the protests in Washington, the PAC spending, the letter writing and advertising campaigns, the endless blogging and tying-up of phone lines did not matter.   219 Representatives and 56 Senators did what they wanted to do, in pure “damn the torpedoes” fashion. Even in their unanimous opposition, there simply weren’t enough Republicans to make a difference.

And therein lies the biggest lesson.

In the end, it really does boil down to the character of the individual members in Congress.   It is they who get to create legislation, not us.   At the moment of voting, they are in control, not us.  That should now be clear to everyone.  So when you combine the character of someone who would sell their vote with the character of someone who would buy it, a market for votes where none should exist, things like ObamaCare are made possible.

The opposite power dynamic exists on exactly one day every two years.   This coming November 2nd, theoretically the voters could turn the entire Congress out.   We all know that won’t happen.   But think about it for a second:  Nancy Pelosi, who orchestrated the resurrection of ObamaCare, has been voted back into Congress eleven times.    Steny Hoyer, fourteen times, Maxine (“socializing“) Waters, nine times. Bart Stupak, eight times.  Henry Waxman, seventeen times.  Charlie Rangel, nineteen times.   John Dingell, twenty-seven times. How about in the Senate?   Harry Reid, three times (now in his twenty-fourth year as a Senator).  Barbara Boxer, twice.  Barbara Mikulski, three times.  Arlen Spector, four times.  Enough already (of them and these statistics).

We let this happen.   There are more of us than there are of them.  So the only explanation for the lack of a permanent limited-government majority in Congress is a lack of voter participation by us.  We have received the legislation that through our own voter apathy we allowed to happen.  Voter turnout, defined by George Mason University’s Dr. Michael McDonald as those eligible to vote (not merely those of voting age), still remains pathetic in the low 60% range.   This means over a third of the country does not care enough about its future to either help keep it as it is, or change it into something better. All of this needs to end.   We are now seeing the consequences of the status quo.

But it seems like those on the limited-government side are finally getting the message.   Republican challengers to Democratic incumbents are emerging in large numbers.   And Conservative challengers to Republicans are out there as well, as Florida’s Charlie Crist knows only too well.  And of course, there’s the Tea Party movement, to which Gandhi’s famous quote hopefully applies:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

And on that note, support thus far for the Tea Party is encouraging. Indeed, it is theirs for the taking.   To those of you stepping out and wearing that label, please, make us proud:   Be professional, not amateurish.  Be courteous, not rude.   Be persuasive, not repulsive.  Be effective, not merely energetic.  Hit the spell check button.  In short, be electable. For every step back we need two steps forward, not the other way around.

To those of you who can’t possibly run for office, by all means, support those who can.     I firmly believe that no one can buy an election, but I also firmly believe that one can’t get elected without getting their message out.  That comes down to money, and often a lot of it.    When the entire character of the country’s political foundation is being assaulted, can you come up with a better use of fifty bucks, or a hundred, or a thousand, than to help the right kind of leaders get into office, and to stay there? Leverage the professionals as well,  like The Club For Growth, Americans for Prosperity, or FreedomWorks.   With the kind of political leadership we have in place right now, those who would constantly seek new ways to pick your pocket of those aforementioned funds and squander it,  is there any better investment?   Take out your checkbook and start writing.

And on November 2, 2010, make sure that you, and everyone you know, represent.

Click here for a Free Subscription