From his website:

I'm still working on that essay trying to take into account both economic and political realities. Do understand, by "the republic" I do NOT mean a mass plebiscitory democracy. We all know where those go. They are merely part of the eternal cycle of governments which the Framers hoped to get us out of.



By Republic I meant a constitutional republic, a government of limited jurisdiction but supreme within its limits. We used to have one. I grew up in it, and as late as 1964 it seemed to exist: those were the days when the Federal Budget was $100 billion and that was thought too high and temporary because of the Cold War.

We now believe that government, and by that we mean the central government, can educate the children, give everyone health care, limit campaign contributions, enforce ethics in the corporations, even out the business cycle, defend us from terror, deliver the mail, operate an air traffic control system, do science, keep up a space station, inspect the food, ensure that all drugs are safe and effective, keep us from being burned by too hot coffee being served in driveins and punish any company that serves coffee that is too hot, prevent racial discrimination everywhere, protect us all from hate crimes, give the elderly a decent and carefree retirement with dignity, give everyone decent health care, mandate peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, keep a strong Army and Navy, see that everyone has a place to stay, protect minorities from hate, ensure civil rights to all, prosecute local police who have been acquitted by local juries, build the highways, keep the railroads operating, dredge harbors, protect the environment including making sure that all toxic waste sites are cleaned up, prosecute people for interfering with navigable waterways even if the waterway hasn't had any water in it for a decade, preserve endangered species, prevent forest fires, sponsor research for future generations, transfer enough wealth from the young to keep the elderly in good shape, transfer enough wealth from the productive to keep the unproductive out of poverty, keep the ports open, settle labor disputes, end poverty everywhere, and I am sure I have left something out.

If you run for office on a platform of "He's your Uncle, not your Dad" and "People ought to take care of themselves, not depend on the government," I'll vote for you but it's unlikely you'll win.

I better stop before I get more depressed.



He did leave a lot out. This list could go on for forty pages, thousands of pages if you go into enough detail.

The budget is now twice what it was in 1974, in constant dollars, and no one, out of those few who have even bothered to acknowledge this stunning fact, has ever given me a valid reason why this should be the case, other than "the economy is larger, too." This is irrelevant to what things cost, and is as stupid as claiming that just because someone is a millionaire, it is reasonable that he should pay $10,000 for a loaf of bread.

The real reason the budget is as large as it is is because the government is doing thousands of things it has no business doing, a couple of really expensive things it has no business doing, and is wasteful to the point of criminality about doing all of it.

And yet some jackasses keep babbling that we still aren't paying enough taxes.

I say cut the goddam spending, and if anyone claims that's impossible, then he should sit down and shut up because he has no working brain and nothing to contribute to a rational conversation. He is as pathetic as a five hundred pound man who says he will starve if he can't eat that Twinkie.