In my previous post I wrote about how the US Constitution is fundamentally flawed in that it bases our government on the belief that a free and republican people will usually elect wise representatives, while the facts of history prove that they will not.  I want to follow up with some comments on another problem with representative democracy, or as it is sometimes called, republicanism.

When politicians in a republic run for office they make promises of what they will have the government do for the voters if they are elected to office.  Each candidate will bid up their promises in hopes of gaining the most votes.

After being elected, the politician follows through on as many of those campaign promises as possible.

The long term effect of that process is the government doing more and more for the people.  The inevitable result is what Sarah Palin once called “The Nanny State.”  The government does a lot for the people in exchange for votes for politicians.  Eventually the people lose the ability to do those things for themselves.

It’s kind of like the way we have lost the ability to sing.  One hundred years ago people would sing for entertainment.  Everyone knew some songs.  Then along came recorded music.  And radio.  Today if we want musical entertainment we just turn on the radio, or iTunes, or pop in a CD, or watch certain TV shows.  Over time we stopped singing.  A lot of people today could not sing an entire song because we don’t know the words to any song.  Sometimes at kids’ birthday parties it’s hard to get some folks to sing “Happy Birthday.” We are dependent on others to provide us with musical entertainment.

Likewise, when government does things for us we lose the ability to do those things for ourselves.  A lot of people live on Social Security and Medicare.  They never learned to save and plan for future health problems.  The government takes care of those folks, and the politicians continually manipulate those folks’ dependencies on government for votes.

In the long run republicanism must create the Nanny State.  The people must inevitably become dependent on government to take care of them.

The politicians in a republic will inevitably come to specialize in manipulating the dependencies of the people to get votes from them.  They evolve over time through natural selection.  Eventually the strongest of their breed will rule society.

The politicians in a republic eventually give away so much of other people’s money supporting the dependencies of their voters that their economy will collapse.  They eventually manipulate society through laws and regulations, trying to live up to their campaign promises to create government controlled “fairness,” to a point where society can barely function.  Isn’t that what we are seeing today?

As I observe the current political debate of the Left vs the Right, I don’t see a solid awareness of the causes of today’s economic problems.  The causes are inherent in the system of republicanism.  I hear pundits howling about how evil one group of politicians is and how they should be kicked out of office.  Those pundits are good at diagnosing the symptoms, but not the disease.

I’ve heard it said that socialists believe that socialism would work, if only the right people were running the socialist state.  They believe that socialism is a workable system.  The problem, they say, is that the right people aren’t in power.  The reality is that the system of socialism is inherently flawed.  It just doesn’t work, and it never will.  But the socialists continue insisting that the solution is to get the right people into power.  Isn’t that the same argument we hear in our republic?  That our form of government, republicanism, should work, we just need to get the right people into power?  That is the essence of the argument of Left vs Right.

The symptoms of the disease of republicanism have never been more obvious than can be observed in the current US government.  The symptoms must be treated before they destroy what is left of the United States of America.  That is a certainty.  But the cause of the disease must still be treated, otherwise the symptoms will come back, and they will evolve and return worse than the previous time they were treated, or they might even be terminal this time.

If the US is to continue to exist we must change our form of government from republicanism to something that is not inherently flawed.  We need to shift our efforts from doing damage control and trying to make the system work by trying to get the right people into office, and put more focus on correcting the cause of the problem.  If we don’t fundamentally change our form of government we will meet the same fate as previous democracies.  Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10 that democracies ” … have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”  If we do not change, Madison has described the fate of US government.

Don’t expect the current bunch of US politicians to make these changes for you.  They won’t.  They are the disease, not the cure.  Your love of freedom is the cure.

Stumble it!