America needs you, President Madison

And Locke and Montesquieu, too

The Big, Beautiful Bill is losing momentum in the Senate. The Very Stable Genius says in a Truth Social post that he agrees with Elizabeth Warren that the US government ought to do away with the whole notion of a debt ceiling. The VSG and Elon Musk are very publicly ending their bromance.

This present situation is just the latest form of the cacophony of posturing that arises whenever some combination of players from the legislative and executive branches resolves to, by golly, get a handle on this whole matter of government expansion and profligacy. And, as always, the current attempt, or gesture posing as an attempt, is a lot of white noise signifying nothing.

Everything everybody’s talking about is mere nibbling at the edges. The debt and deficit won’t be tamed as long as the country refuses to look at the fact that US unfunded liabilities are 100 percent due to Medicare and Social Security. That, in turn, is due to the poorly anticipated post-Baby Boom generational contractions, as well as the constant expansion of what citizens expect from government services.

A couple of great books for understanding how FDR went from being a fairly non-ideological New York governor to the New Deal’s chief architect are The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes and The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester. They come at that examination from different angles, but both make clear that the state of the nation’s economy was so dire by early 1933 that, in the hours after his swearing in, Roosevelt was telling his advisors and appointees to try anything, to throw ideas at the wall and see what would stick. As fixes were applied to immediate concerns, such as the banking industry, conversations arose about looking after demographics in need in a more long-term way. Other countries had been instituting social insurance. Maybe it was something for the US to try.

Labor secretary Frances Perkins liked the idea of selling Social Security on the basis that it was an investment, that citizens’ payroll contributions meant they had skin in the game. Perkins knew that that pitch would make it invulnerable to future attempts to do away with it. (“I’ve been paying in my whole working life! That’s my money!”)

It took a while for the public to really cotton to Social Security. By the 1950s, enough people were getting its benefits that its popularity took hold. By that time as well, lots of tweaking to make it more comprehensive had come along:

In 1939, FDR signed amendments to the Social Security Act that introduced dependent and survivor benefits for workers’ spouses and children. In addition, the amendments increased benefit amounts and changed the year that people could start receiving benefits from 1942 to 1940. Even so, Social Security didn’t gain widespread popularity until the 1950s, Béland says, when more people began seeing benefits from Social Security payments.

Presidents after FDR expanded Social Security in significant ways. During the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed amendments that expanded the job categories eligible for Social Security and added a disability insurance program. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed amendments that established the Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs.

Since then, every so often someone trots out the notion of a “lockbox” that would ostensibly isolate entitlement contributions from use as general revenue, but it has yet to become codified into law.

And now Trump is adamant that these programs are sacrosanct in their present form. And that having no cap on what government can spend is just fine. The problem with that is beginning to show up in real time: Treasury bonds, which make possible the financing of the national debt, are showing signs of shakiness. Long-term yields are rising in conditions under which that normally wouldn’t happen.

But nothing’s going to get done about it. The reason is that the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20thg centuries were wildly successful at convincing the public that modern, urbanized, industrialized life was too complex to be addressed by the Founders’ view of the scope of government.

But you, dear Precipice readers, know that principles are by definition immutable. They are that which can provide a lodestar no matter what socioeconomic conditions look like at any given time.

And you also know the succession of great minds that honed the idea of individual sovereignty, which was novel in the 1700s.

Locke really got the conversation going:

As I said in the piece titled “John Locke and the Ruckus in the Harbor” I wrote for The Freemen News-letter on the occasion of the Boston Tea Party’s anniversary,

. . . the groundwork had been laid in the ideas fleshed out in Chapter 5 of John Locke’s 1690 work Second Treatise on Civil Government.

One noteworthy aspect of that work is that Locke refers to God more than was characteristic for him. He predicates what he has to say about appropriating objects found in nature for productive use by asserting that the human being owns himself, as is befitting a creature imbued with free will. By inference, what the individual does with that self is his own as well.

Locke also shows that money is more than a lifeless medium of exchange for use in purely material transactions. Money allows two individuals or groups thereof to arrive at that thing that is so exceedingly rare in human affairs: agreement. After ownership of the natural objects of the world has been established, money makes possible the gravitation of those things to situations that are most inclined to enhance everyone’s well-being. Person A has a surplus of, say, corn grown on his land, but that surplus is going to have value to Person B, who owns a mill, that would not even occur to Person A until he’s approached about it. After the transaction, Person A’s realm of possibility for improving his lot is greatly expanded. He can spend or invest the money he’s gained in any number of ways.

It’s from the elegance of that scenario that great minds are motivated to consider how to best guarantee that no entity overrides the agreement. How shall we protect not the safety of Persons A and B and their corn and money, as well as ensure that the value of the corn isn’t distorted by outside forces?

Taxation is as old as the notion of government itself. It wasn’t until Locke and thinkers in his wake woke people up to the notion of individual sovereignty and the necessity of volition in economic activity, however, that anyone had much of a framework beyond brute force for talking about ownership and exchange.

Montesquieu expanded on it:

"Political liberty" is Montesquieu's concept of what we might call today personal security, especially in so far as this is provided for through a system of dependable and moderate laws. He distinguishes this view of liberty from two other views of political liberty. The first is the view that liberty consists in collective self-government—i.e. that liberty and democracy are the same. The second is the view that liberty consists in being able to do whatever one wants without constraint. Not only are these latter two not genuine political liberty, he maintains, but they can both be hostile to it.

Political liberty is not possible in a despotic political system, but it is possible, though not guaranteed, in republics and monarchies. Generally speaking, establishing political liberty on a sound footing requires two things:

• The separation of the powers of government.

Building on and revising a discussion in John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, Montesquieu argues that the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of government should be assigned to different bodies, so that attempts by one branch of government to infringe on political liberty might be restrained by the other branches. (Habeas corpus is an example of a check that the judicial branch has on the executive branch of government.) In a lengthy discussion of the English political system, he tries to show how this might be achieved and liberty secured, even in a monarchy. He also notes that liberty cannot be secure where there is no separation of powers, even in a republic.

• The appropriate framing of civil and criminal laws so as to ensure personal security.

Montesquieu intends what modern legal scholars might call the rights to "robust procedural due process", including the right to a fair trial, the presumption of innocence and the proportionality in the severity of punishment. Pursuant to this requirement to frame civil and criminal laws appropriately to ensure political liberty (i.e., personal security), Montesquieu also argues against slaveryand for the freedom of thought, speech and assembly.

This, in turn, led to the vision of the indispensable James Madison:

Madison held that the legitimate and primary function of a just

government is “to protect property of every sort; as well that which

lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term par-

ticularly expresses” (Madison 1792, in Hunt 1906: 102). Thus, in

the Madisonian vision of government and society, there is no sep-

aration between good government, personal liberty, private pro -

perty, and justice.

“It is sufficiently obvious,” Madison ([1829a] 1865: 51) argued,

“that persons and property are the two great subjects on which

Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons and the rights

of property are the objects for the protection of which Government

was instituted.” Madison’s constitutional republic was to be one of

limited powers under a rule of law, rather than an intrusive state

aimed at redistributing income and wealth via the democratic process.

The basis of the U.S. experiment in designing a system of govern-

ment to “secure the blessings of liberty” was the principle of consent.

Within a regime protecting individual rights to life, liberty, and prop-

erty, people would be free to pursue their own happiness without

interfering with the equal rights of others.

Madison directly addressed the issue at the core of redistribution temptation: It’s unjust:

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it,

where the property which a man has in his personal safety

and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one

class of citizens for the service of the rest. . . . That is not a

just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbi-

trary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of

its citizens that free use of their faculties and free choice of

their occupations, which not only constitute their property in

the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring

property strictly so called. . . . A just security to property is not

afforded by that government under which unequal taxes

oppress one species of property and reward another species;

where arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the

rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where

the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insuf-

ficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied by an unfeel-

ing policy, as another spur.

In sum, law, liberty, and justice are inseparable. Law is the use of

force to protect our natural rights to life, liberty, and property; liberty

is the freedom to act within the law; and justice is the safeguarding

of property broadly conceived.

So let’s be clear: what Dewey, Veblen, Croly et al, and then a few years later, Roosevelt, Perkins et al loosed upon the earth was not some enhancement of the original American vision. It was completely counter to it.

The whatabouts that can be presented as rebuttals are numerous: the necessity of pulling the nation out of the Depression, the necessity of bringing black Americans into full participation in national life, the increase in our knowledge about aging, technological advancement.

But none of them address the fact that government intrusion into human affairs beyond the scope envisioned by Locke, Montesquieu and Madison diminishes human ingenuity. Because we’ve so fully bought into the Progressive idea that government ought to address old age and sickness, we keep banging our heads against the same old parameters defining the range of ideas we’re willing to look at.

So what can be done to steer this big unwieldy ship back onto a Madisonian course?

What it would really take involves so many levels of changed behavior that it looks like a Quixotic task. Parents would, en masse, need to start reading to their kids, cultivating their delight in physical books. Schools would have to start providing real civic education, as well as an exposure to philosophy and the great questions of what makes for a worthwhile life and how to organize society to foster that, and we’d have to consistently elect politicians with a lot more courage and integrity than in generally found in that line of work.

But we’re so mired in materialism, in the notion that education is about preparing for a lucrative career, and in the notion that government ought to assume the burden of seeing to our well-being beyond protection of life, freedom and property, that we’re not motivated for such an undertaking in sufficient numbers.

And so we get these silly fallings-out, as between Musk and Trump, and the making for strange bedfellows, such as between Trump and Warren, and a focus on the Big Beautiful Bill’s effect on the debt.

No one’s talking about the most important level: transcendent matters. You know, things like dignity and ingenuity and agency. Being made in our Creator’s image and likeness.

Which is probably why cultural flourishing has ground to a standstill, and AI is making a mockery of the whole notion of education. We’ve handed our specialness as a species, and as individual members of that species, over to a leviathan that will dole out our daily ration of soma and see to it that our pretty little heads are not troubled by the question of meaning.