Were the Founders Really in Favor of Limited Government? Is So Why?

Big Tent Revue points to an old article in Dissent which challanges this idea, or at least points out the the country's founders were far more complex politicaly than we give them credit for. They did all seem to believe that disparities in wealth were a big problem and limiting the size of the national government was a way for the wealthy to ensure that any compeition from below was stiffled. The purpose of limiting government was to enhance equality. Things have changed since then.

From Bid Tent Review:

A fascinating and revealing article from an old Dissent about the redistributive dimensions of early Jeffersonian thought. The founding fathers are often portrayed, particularly by rightists, as devoutly laissez-faire. In reality, they seemed to divide up between conservative Hamiltonian corporatists and radical Jeffersonian egalitarians, the former urging government collusion with commercialists and the latter urging some form of leveling to the advantage of small holders and craftsmen. From the start, the only place where laissez-faire prevailed was at the federal level; states and localities had broad powers to police morals and markets. And even at the federal level, “hands off” inherently meant favoring some against others.

“Wealth, like suffrage,” Taylor wrote in his Inquiry Into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, “must be considerably distributed, to sustain a democratick republic; and hence, whatever draws a considerable proportion of either into a few hands, will destroy it. As power follows wealth, the majority must have wealth or lose power.”

From Dissent:

If the welfare state means progressive taxation, social spending to strengthen the middle class and elevate the poor, and the regulation of corporate power, it does not offend Jeffersonian principles. What offends Jeffersonian principles is a government that “fortifies the conspiracies” of the rich and powerful (as Philadelphia republican George Logan put it in 1792), leaving ordinary people without protection from their strategies and combinations and their public disregard. By that standard, we have reached a new low point of Jeffersonian liberty. In Jefferson’s name, the government has promoted inequality, not restrained it. It has punished poor communities, weakened the middle class, and created a new ruling class that makes our old Loyalist enemies seem moderate and unjustly maligned. The people responsible for this certainly do have a philosophy of limited government. But their limited government is the Gilded Age version, a doctrine of elite self-defense. It is not the early American version, where the beginning of freedom is equality of productive resources, and limiting government is necessary to prevent that equality from being destroyed by wealthy elites.
In 2301, as we begin to discuss public opinion, we need to determine why our attitudes about history changes from time to time. The Diissent article makes a provocative claim the supporters of limits government have distorted what the founders actually thought about the role of government and the need for more equal distribution of wealth.

No Right to Assembly in Egypt

Here's a depressing post which illustrates the value, to autocrats, of limits to the right of assembly: 

Egypt seems to be returning slowly to normality. True, in Tahrir Square, the heart of Cairo, thousands remain to chant the slogans of Resistance, but you can breathe the air of a sad defeat. Surprisingly, protesters have lost.

Boys returning home from Tahrir Square have disappeared, taken by officers of the Mukhabarat, the Egyptian intelligence service. The same intelligence service that was controlled by Omar Suleiman, now the Vice President who is leading so-called transition from the Mubarak regime. The dream of a democratisation of Egypt, the dream of this spontaneous insurgency is being shelved by a regime that knows how to change to remain the same.

Presidential Power and the Gulf Oil Spill

From the National Journal, some commentary on the state of presidential power. While executive powers have expanded considerably over the past century, it still has practical limits. Campaign rhetoric aside, presidents aren't Superman. And while we hear concerns about Obama's apparent attempts to expand executive power we nevertheless, we also hear calls that Obama should do more to contain the oil spill, which requires him to usurp more executive power of course. We did the same with Bush and terrorism, as well as other presidents and whatever crises happened during their tenure. We want executive power both expanded and limited at the same time. We criticize presidents for abusing power, and for not using it.

So, as a public, do we say that we want limited government in principle, but demand expansive power in practice? Is we wish government to be limited, we have to accept the idea that certain things are going to happen without our control or influence -- like huge oil spills. Do we really, collectively, want that? I think the American public is conflicted about governmental power and attitudes about Obama's response to the oil spill encapsulate that.

Here's the story:

The Gulf, Unplugged: When it comes to stopping the Gulf oil spill, we don't hear the president shouting 'Yes, we can!'
by Will Englund

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Looking for more?

This week, the Obama administration made a show of the various ways it is taking care of business connected to the oil spill -- steps that are significant and most likely necessary, but none of them having any effect on the gusher itself.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation into the disaster. President Obama held a Rose Garden ceremony to introduce the co-chairmen of a commission charged with figuring out how to prevent another such catastrophe. (They are Bob Graham, the former senator and Florida governor, and William K. Reilly, who was President George H.W. Bush's Environmental Protection Agency chief, back when the Exxon Valdez was hitting the rocks.)

As always at such events, the two eminent commissioners kept mum, but that may have been especially prudent in this instance, in which no one, at the moment, has a good solution to the unfolding disaster.

Obama doesn't have the luxury of silence. He has to talk about this mess. Last week, at his press conference, he veered into long explanations of what the government could and could not do, and what it should be doing.

In the Rose Garden, he was a little more trenchant and a lot terser. Yet White House reporters later badgered press secretary Robert Gibbs about whether the president has displayed sufficient rage over the BP spill. Gibbs parried and talked around the question and, before the dialogue had played itself out, several dozen more barrels of petroleum, at least, had flowed out of the Deepwater Horizon well and into the Gulf of Mexico.

Neither a raging president nor commissioners nor crusading prosecutors can stop the oil. All may have a role to play in the larger story surrounding the event but none is central to the solution.
In the meantime, Obama isn't getting very good marks on the spill. By margins of 5-to-10 percentage points, polls taken in late May show that more Americans disapprove than approve of his handling of the crisis. Conservative critics lambaste the president for not doing more about the spill and accuse him of plotting to use it as a pretext to halt offshore drilling. Public support for drilling has dropped dramatically, however, since the "drill, baby, drill" days of 2008; support fell from 62 percent to 45 percent in CBS News polls.

Americans have come to expect their presidents to be able to set right anything that goes wrong. It's an idea that presidential candidates like to nurture -- and maybe none more so than Obama, with his "Yes, we can" slogan -- but no president, once in office, can live up to that expectation. Theater, and a sense of timing, though, can help.

Ronald Reagan went to Berlin and demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" And when, two years later, the wall did come down, Reagan's supporters seized on it as proof of his genius and daring. If Obama had gone down to the Gulf at the right moment and declaimed, "BP, plug up this hole!" it wouldn't have stopped the oil any more than Reagan's speech brought down the wall, but it could have been thrilling to his allies.

It wasn't always like this. The biggest oil spill in U.S. history was the Lakeview Gusher, in California. It blew in March 1910 and went on for 18 months. President Taft appears to have said nothing about it. Two statewide Democratic candidates made a point of driving by it one day -- to enjoy the thrilling sight of a fountain of crude.

The Gulf spill, whatever its ultimate dimensions, will clearly inflict far more environmental damage than Lakeview did, given its location. But this is also not an era that is receptive to an "accidents happen" outlook on life.

Obama has been lucky in one aspect: Oil companies are about as unpopular as health insurers. BP makes a handy villain (and the British accent of its CEO, Tony Hayward, may reinforce the point). Polls show that virtually no one approves of BP's handling of the crisis. One puzzle is that an administration that is powerless to address the physical problem -- the oil welling up from below -- has been so slow to turn against the oil company that drilled the hole in the first place.