Following up on my dismay at the inability of our leaders in Washington to restore fiscal sanity to our federal government, I found a prescient blog post by American Thinker's Ed Kaitz in reaction to Joe Biden and others on the Left relegating tea party activists' role in the national debate to those of terrorists. Kaitz reminds those on the Left of the
three evils of government the father of our U.S. Constitution, James Madison, warned against in establishing our constitutional republic:
[Madison] argued at the end of his brilliant Federalist #10 that there were three "wicked projects" that -- in the hands an unscrupulous political faction -- could potentially inflame our Republic with a most devastating plague: "a rage for paper money, [an] abolition of debts, [and] an equal division of property."
In other words, deficit spending, bailouts, and welfare state socialism -- the three pillars of the modern Democratic Party -- were, to Madison, the likeliest and most "wicked" threats to America's self-preservation.
Kaitz lays the failure to avoid the evils Madison, whose views borrowed heavily from philosopher John Locke, at the doorstep of the Democratic Party. I disagree with him because the problem of deficit spending, bailouts and welfare state socialism has been a bipartisan effort in Washington. Yes, Republicans are more likely to rail about those three evils in their stump speeches while campaigning for office, but once elected, their actions speak louder than their words. They have a Faustian bargain with the Democrats. Allow us to expand our military industrial complex and you can have your permanent welfare state; we'll haggle with you over the level of taxation, but we will always agree to borrow whatever is necessary to let both of us have our cake and eat it too.
