Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, sent a letter to his team on Feb. 26 that said: “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”
Welcome to the party, pal!
After letting objective journalism die at the Post under the banner of “Democracy dies in darkness” since 2017, it is comforting to see business execs, especially those who have made it big in America like Bezos, finally come to their senses.
The purpose, or telos, of our participatory government is to ensure personal liberties and free markets, just as Bezos said. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were brilliant thinkers who set forth those principles in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
However, two things have undercut both goals since before the ink was dry on the ratification papers in 1790: the commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause.
Both have been used by activists to gain power to do any number of things government should not be asked to do. Using the coercive power of law to take money from you to spend on things they want to do is just too intoxicating for most politicians — they are like Willie Sutton, who said he robbed banks because “that is where the money is!”
Government is where the money is today.
While the framers of the Constitution were pretty explicit about what they wanted the federal government to do with specific enumerated powers, it might have been helpful to enumerate explicitly what government should never do as well.
- Our government is not supposed to be a bank of last resort. For anything. The telos of our free market private banking system is to collect money from depositors and lend it to accredited customers. Take all lending activity and taxpayer guarantees out of government and let the banking system do its job.
- Our government is not an insurance company. The telos of an insurance company is to insure every known activity or property known to mankind. They have actuaries and executives who know how to do it very well. Let them insure any downside risk for any business or individual, not the government.
- Our income tax system tempts every far-left progressive socialist to become Robin Hood “to take from the rich and give to the poor.” Replace the income tax with a broad-based consumption/transfer excise tax system, which would make it nearly impossible for anyone to rig the system to their benefit.
- Our federal government should not be in the wealth maximization, financial planning, retirement business. Let investment companies do it ― making money from investments is their telos, not government’s.
Government can and should do what the private sector and individuals cannot, and should not, do. There are legitimate reasons for government, and they all have to do with spending money on things that benefit all of us, not just a few.
We want to be protected from foreign adversaries by a lethal military force subject to civilian authority and governance. The same thing applies to local police forces and sheriffs ― everyone benefits from safe streets and neighborhoods. Taxpayers should pay for their services. Rich people could form their own armies and police forces, but that would look too much like the Roman Empire for American tastes.
The Constitution established post roads to maintain federal post offices. But what happens when email and FedEx make the postal system obsolete? Do we keep losing $10 billion annually to keep an archaic postal system alive simply because it is “constitutional”?
President Dwight Eisenhower wanted to modernize our transportation system to improve our economy and emulate the Autobahn in Germany, which he did under the “provide for the common defense” clause of the Constitution, not the post roads provision. We all benefit from good roads, airports and clean air and water, which fit into the telos of our democratic republic form of government.
Do we all benefit from a $32,000 State Department grant to fund a comic addressing LGBTQ issues in Peru in 2022? No, that is outside the telos of the U.S. government in almost every way, shape and form.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant wants to “reprivatize the private sector.” Evaluate every federal program on a zero-based budgeting basis and see if it can be better done outside of government.
Chances are very high it can.
Thomas Jefferson often wrote about the necessity for the living generation to make decisions about how they want to live rather than do things because that is how they have “always” been done in the past.
DOGE is a once-in-a-century opportunity to push The Big Red Reset Button for what we living Americans want our government to do and be. We should press it hard and rediscover the telos of the Constitution.
