Voters Revolt as Governments Make Decisions For Them

The discontent in Western democracies is due to their becoming less and less democratic.  The problem is increasingly arbitrary decisions governments are making supposedly to take care of their people.  Progressives world-wide seem to believe that large segments of the population are too ignorant and stupid to make their own decisions.  This runs counter to John Locke’s basic principle that government requires the consent of the governed.
 
In the US, consent of the governed is the basic principle the country was built on.  John Locke first coined the phrase as part of his “Two Treatises on Government,” published in 1690 to justify replacing King James II of England with William and Mary in 1688.  So it’s important in Britain as well.  Consent of the governed is what allowed Parliament to legislate the Act of Settlement in 1701, which set the rule of Succession for the British Monarchy that’s still in force today.
 
Locke thought that government exists to preserve the life, liberty and property of each person it governs.  This phrase, edited to make it more user friendly, was used in the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  The chief purpose of government in Western democracies today is to regulate life, constrict liberty and redistribute property, usually without the consent of the governed.
 
Current US government practice is that almost all new laws that pass Congress are passed as shells, which are filled in later by regulatory agencies, executive orders and court rulings.  The problem with regulations, executive orders and court decisions is that none of the processes used to make these things is designed to get the consent of the governed.  Conversely, the voters can’t hold the regulatory agencies, executive departments and judges responsible for their actions.  In the US, regulatory boards are appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate, to fixed terms of office.  Judges are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for life terms.
 
While I’m not quite as clear about how things work in Europe, it appears to me that the European Union does business the same way.  Most of their important policies seem to be the result of regulatory agencies or court decisions.  Voters don’t get to hold the decision makers accountable.
 
Bypassing legislatures makes the flow of new regulations arbitrary and largely unpredictable.  What are, in effect, laws come out of murky processes in back rooms at regulatory agencies or government executive departments.  Then they are subject to review in the courts where the decisions are also hard to predict.  The process is like a ping pong match, and the ball bounces around with almost no attempt to gain the consent of the people who will bear the burden of the new rules.  The chaotic nature of regulatory processes inhibits long term private sector investment.  You’re not going to invest in something which takes 5 or 10 years to pay off if it could be regulated out of existence in 3 to 6 months.
 
In the US, we have an especially virulent form of this chaos called the “Living Constitution.”  Most people probably think that the Constitution is like a contract.  The meaning of a contract is fixed when the contract is signed.  So logically, the meaning of the Constitution or a Constitutional Amendment should be fixed at the time it’s ratified.  The “Living Constitution” doctrine says that the meaning of the Constitution changes over time, based on changing modern conditions.  This works out as an excuse to alter the Constitution in the Supreme Court by finding new meaning in the Constitution to suit progressive fashion.  In the past, Justices had to decide based on what the law or the Constitution said, whether they like it or not.  Now Justices can decide cases based on what they would like the law to be.
 
The president wields almost all of the power of the modern regulatory state in the US.  He or she issues executive orders, in effect controls all regulatory agencies and appoints all judges, including Supreme Court Justices.  The appointment of “Living Constitution” Justices was extremely important to the left.  Because of Antonin Scalia’s death and the age and ill health of 2 or 3 other Justices, whoever won 2016 was going to be decisive in deciding whether the “Living Constitution” doctrine prevailed or not.  The normal ways to change the Constitution require 3/4ths of the States to ratify an amendment.  Since Republicans control both legislative chambers in 32 states, that isn’t going to happen for progressives.  Their only shot at big changes was cheating with a “Living Constitution” in the Supreme Court.  That’s why Trump published a list of 21 judges he would consider appointing to the Supreme Court.  All of them were original meaning judges, not “Living Constitution” judges.  This list gave conservative Republicans, like me, the confidence to vote for Trump no matter how bad his manners were.  Voting for Hillary would have erased the Constitution by allowing it to be completely redefined.
 
President Obama was especially energetic in concentrating as much power as possible into the Oval Office.  Obama used his pen and phone without restraint in his second term to avoid having to deal with Republicans in Congress.  He created precedents that were safe only if Hillary Clinton succeeded him.  The Democrats went all in, betting that Hillary Clinton would win in 2016 and secure Obama’s legacy.
 
What happened was a Trump victory.  All of the pen and phone power Obama concentrated in the Oval Office will be used to undo the entire hope and change of the last 8 years.  Trump will make at least two Supreme Court appointments.  The Justices Trump appoints will be deciding cases for about 20 years.
 
This sudden disastrous outcome has completely unhinged the American left, and even some of the Republican establishment.  Instead of permanently remaking the country, the left lost everything to a loud mouthed reality TV star with a lower class accent and abrasive manners, who insults the press constantly with tweets at 3 AM.  The Us mainstream media dreams of ways to bring down Trump because they have no other way to fundamentally remake America the way they planned.  They have even gotten as far as speculating about a CIA mutiny or a military coup in the US.  The Pravda Press is in complete denial, looking for any way to roll the dice again for even a small chance to undo the damage..  The left's desperation measures the magnitude of their reversal.

Imposing Regulatory State is Causing the Decline of the West

I think decadence in the West is a result of a gradual change in the goals government pursues and the way government operates.  The basis of Western Civilization, and arguably any civilization, is the rule of law.  Without predictability, economic investments with long term payoffs are impossible to make.  Our current prosperity began with John Locke’s idea, from his 1690 “Two Treatises on Government,” that government required the consent of the governed and that government’s purpose was to secure the life, liberty and property of the people it governed. The way Western "democratic" governments operate today is to have experts make regulatory decisions for people without their consent.  Government makes people follow rules that it thinks are good for them, and redistributes property in the name of social justice, which usually means buying votes with entitlements.

English history from 1600 to 1700 was very important to the Founders who set up the United States.  The Declaration of Independence was the American Colonies’ formal withdrawal of our consent to be governed by King George III.  This was especially important because King George III was King of England by the Act of Settlement passed in 1701, which chose the Hanoverians over the Stuarts to be Kings of England.  In other words, King George II was King of England by consent of the governed.  There were several contemporary claimants to the throne of England with better rights of descent than George III.

The Constitutional requirement that the president see “that the laws be faithfully executed” was a reaction to Charles I (1600-1649) and James II (1633-1701), who ignored parliamentary laws whenever they found the laws inconvenient.  The 2nd Amendment right to bear arms was an attempt to prevent military dictatorship, like the one imposed by Oliver Cromwell from 1653 to 1658.

The economic enlightenment started by Adam Smith (1723-1790), which Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) extended, argued that economic prosperity required minimal government interference beyond a stable legal framework to enforce commercial contracts.  Common practice at the time they wrote was for the government to grant huge monopolies to private companies, like the British East India Company, which was granted India.  Government granted monopolies then are very similar to crony capitalism today.  Smith and Bastiat argued against government granted monopolies. They said the economy would do better without heavy handed government interference.

 

Starting in 1887, with the passage of the law creating the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate rail road freight rates, US government moved away from the rule of law and towards regulatory guidelines which could be micromanaged.  Starting with the New Deal, the US changed the function of government to constraining liberty and redistributing property.  The New Deal era also produced John Maynard Keynes’ idea that government spending stimulates the economy.  Prior to Keynes, governments limited spending and tried to cut taxes during hard times.  Ironically, one of Keynes most famous quotes is that politicians “are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”  Most Western politicians in power today are the slaves of John Maynard Keynes.

Today, Western democratic governments are not really democratic.  The most important decisions are made by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in regulatory agencies and judges who are changing rather than interpreting the law.  The governing philosophy is that the consent of the governed is no longer needed because the governed are too ignorant to know what’s good for them.  Only government experts can make the best decisions for the people.  Increasingly, governments pay people not to work, not to take initiative and not to even try to take care of themselves.  In responding to the incentives to become dependent on the state, people are contributing to their personal decline and also to the decline and fall of the West.  When a civilization’s bill for bread and circuses, now known as transfer payments, becomes so large that they can no longer afford an army to protect themselves, the decline becomes terminal.

The way to reverse the decline is to remove the power from regulatory agencies and judges to make law without the approval of elected representatives.  We also need to stop paying people to be dependent on the state and encourage them to become independent and think for themselves.  If you give a man a fish, he’s hungry tomorrow.  If you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself by fishing every day.  If you give a man a fish every day, why would he make any effort to learn how to fish?