Today's musing minute - impeachment should be about constraining the role of government.

 

Mainly for my non-libertarian (classical liberal) friends. Make no mistake, the distressing political pathology that we are seeing in the end comes down to one basic thing - the size, power and scope of government. Deficits, and levels of debt are bad, but (as Milton Friedman reminded us) it is more fundamentally the extent of government that matters. A small limited government has less power and is less of a target for influence by big business and popularist social groups. Representative democracy only works when the government's powers are clearly and firmly constitutionally constrained. The story of at least the last one hundred years is the steady erosion of these constraints with the predictable effect of entrenching and expanding a powerful ambitious non-elected machinery of government. The progress is steady, but each major crisis has accelerated it.  A certain proportion (who knows how large?) of those who voted for Trump voted against his opponents in the hope that he could and would stem this trend. It seemed to be working for a while, to a limited extent. But it has ended very badly. And those who supported the incoming administration should be under no illusions about what is really going on here. They may have the moral high ground on impeachment, but for the wrong reasons, and within a concept of government that is the opposite of what they are supposed to be impeaching Trump to defend. Trump's most obvious transgression was to maintain and encourage his followers to believe that the vice president, together with Republican loyalists, could and must nullify the election in his favor. But, in his campaign promise to "drain the swamp" he has manifestly failed. Instead, the government leviathan monster rises ascendant with this public spectacle and exacerbates a deeply divided population, a population divided not over the appropriate role of government, but more mundanely simply over who should be in control over that government in order to push their particular bloated agenda. A ubiquitously intrusive government is inevitably corrosive of both freedom and prosperity. Unfortunately, most people who feel the loss of prosperity never realize that its cause lies in the loss of freedom, yet that widespread realization is the only hope of reversing this trend.