By: jeff2

jeff2 — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 23:18:00 +0000

Find me a country where redistribution schemes have eliminated the upper class.   There isn’t one.

Constitutional theory (whether it be the US Constitution or that of any other nation) is not exactly loaded with pragmatism.   “Do this and nobody will want to work anymore” is a good example. When our marginal tax rates were as high as 70%, we didn’t see Howard Hughes, the Kennedys, the Rockefellers and their ilk saying they were going to stop working or were going to flee to other countries.   As long as there was a buck to be made, they bucked up and made it.

There is a bit of contradiction in the idea that our Constitution made us the greatest nation in the world.   Accepting that we are the greatest nation just for the sake of argument, it is easy to point out that our Constitution has not been followed almost ever since its inception.   On top of that, I don’t think too many people would argue that the “New Deal” era legislation was basically the benchmark for when our Constitution essentially died (though some might argue it was the 14th Amendment).   This was about 80 years ago.   So, maybe what made us the greatest nation in the world would be our rulers’ disregard for our Constitution.

In my opinion, our greatness is too often measured by our military might.   We exhaust so many resources building nukes and “policing” (to put it nicely) the world, that the world has to essentially obey us.   That’s all well and good, but it comes at quite a cost.   Other countries can afford greater redistributive schemes simply because they don’t aspire to be the biggest kid on the block.

I’d much rather have my tax money go to helping the sick and elderly than I would to drones and bombs.   Redistribution, like anything, has its virtues and vices, but it’s not all bad per se.

There are reasons that disregarding our Constitution has led to us becoming so powerful.   When a people all live under the same rules, wear the same uniforms, and recite the same pledges, there is power to be had.   To compare, look at how our nation was prior to the Civil War.   We, as a nation, were severely weakened by our own internal differences.

It’s no different than Germany’s rise to power under Hitler.   Once he assumed power, he did away with the concept of a federation of states and created an extremely centralized and powerful nation.

If you want power and efficiency, you have to have singularity of rules and control at the expense of diversity.   This was actually predicted by de Tocqueville in his 1835 work, “Democracy in America.”   In one of the earlier chapters, he noted that because (back then) power was widely dispersed, we would never be a “mighty” nation, though we were likely to be a very happy one.   Things have changed.   We are now less free and more mighty.

Comments on: Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Don’t Use U.S. Constitution?

By: jeff2