Journal entry June 30,2009

The genius of the American political system of government was that it never tried to settle the great debate among citizens. To be an American one simply had to agree that everyone had the right to debate and that the government was the guarantor of Liberty under law. The government was there to assure the continuence of the flow of the great river of debate, not to enforce its will to gain a result. A great tragedy of the last 100 years of so is that the federal government , especially in economics, has attempted to settle the great debate about economics around what may be called "corporatism." This is the idea that all levels of society must be smoothed over and amalgamated so as to make greater and greater centralization possible. It favors the strong over the vulnerable and the big over the nimble.

The wedding of vast corporate wealth to largely unchecked federal power solidifies into time and space a governing system which is highly undemocratic, largely unrepresentative, and always and completely unjust. The dispensing of enormous federal contracts to corporations and the construction of vast beauracratic systems called entitlements have ceded our government to someone else. The legislature has become a meek, miniscule emasculated little speck between the corporate lobbyists who trek to Washington to write the bills and the nameless, faceless, employees of the leviathan of boards and agencies that infest the body politic and practically become unelected legislators through their interpretation of laws and writing of regulations for bills the size of phone books full of details that will effect thew lives of thousands or millions. Is this not undemocratic, unrepresentative??

Many large corporations become dependent on federal or state contracts to the point that they become arms of the government that hires them and conduits by which that government can exert power and influence. The "private" firms become not "public" firms, designed for the general welfare, but public/private sources of largess, patronage and corruption for the governing class in Washington.

Vast entitlement programs funnel revenues to particular groups of people without having to endure the legislative process of appropriating money. Money is in effect appropriated one time by congress for all the time the program exists. Theoretically the program can be ended by legislative democratic means. However, practically, on the level that politics operates, the programs become so large over time that their abolition would mean the collapse of an entire system, be it of health care, retirement insurance or the like. So the systems are undemocratic in their nature in that to oppose them sets one up as the advocate of collapse and chaos.

Therefore the vastness of these programs perpetuates them. In a democratic society nothing should ever be perpetual except Liberty, Justice and the enduring spirit of the People in their political capacity. The increasing centralization and corporatism of our government runs counter to this trinity of democratic virtues.