Rule by Crisis

By: Brian Rodgers
Brian Rodgers is a former Naval Officer and Contributor to ITPS
editorial@inthepublicsquare.com

Even while America is reeling from Congressional sticker shock from the $700 Billion bailout, we must come to grips with a phenomenon which is likely be become a fixture of a Congress controlled by the political left.

What we must prepare ourselves for is a country ruled less by the sober council of restraining law and moral conscience and more by the Rule by Crisis.

You see, the leftist materialist philosophy which presently dominates the Democrat Party and large parts of our political electorate is dependant on the idea that all, or at least almost all, human social ills can be solved by material solutions. That means money. And it means lots and lots of money. Whether we are talking about crime, health care, drug abuse, violence, education, the definition of marriage, out-of-wedlock pregnancy or foreign policy relationships, the solution to any problem in its final form requires more material resources, which always means-- much more money.

This money must be had whether or not it destroys the economy or bankrupts the nation. Reason is that the primary purpose of government according to Leftist ideology is not to optimize productive, or wealth or restrain itself so that individuals may persue happiness (read the blessing of liberty) within the contraints of moral order, but rather government is an engineering project aimed at reordering and improving society, according to the vision of the Left. Preeminent in this grand social engineering project is the redefinition of the world around us. Words like peace, marriage, justice, hate, war--ideas that are fundamental to how we view the world must be redefined. Children must be brainwashed at the earliest ages. Older folk, like you and me, must be constrained by a vast and insidious legal-cultural appartus called "political correctness".

Outside the protection of this new total state are businesses and private families, and for now, so long as the Leftist see the armed forces as unuseful to their purposes, the military. According to the Leftist agenda, these are exceptions to this rule about money. These fundamental parts of society should be drained of the material resources that compete with their worldview. All these institutions—family, businesses, the church and the military are viewed as unnecessary antediluvian hindrances to an all-compassionate total state eager to solve social ills and personal misfortunes. the family, the church and private business are seen as a pesky interferences and bastions of competing allegiances and non-materialist philosophical or moralistic methodologies. The expanding new order of the state and its programs anoint and reject the institutions that shall be feed with money. And so the families, businesses, churches and the military that are the sinew and muscle (perhaps I should say soul?) of this country will become the ever more sickly host to the bloated need for more and more money for social re-engineering.

Since this New Leftism will demand from the ever diminishing sectors of a free society: family, businesses, churches, and a loyal military—the institutions that protect us, feed us physically and spiritually, build things, dream, create, rear children, remedy emotional need, and stand in the breach to protect us—more and more of the sustenance that supports these institutions will be parasitically sucked out of our national life. Thus the crises of our time will grow even while the means of resolving them diminish.

Government, large and total, is now regarded as the proper engine of social reform and the indisputed effectual method of changing the world. The liberal philosophy behind Big Government will require all the departments and services of the state to expand spending even as revenue declines and the character of America is eroded.

Of course the failure of these programs to solve the problems will only be proof that there is not enough money and not enough government. The predictable failure of these programs will be proof to the secular materialist statists that there are malignant and invisible right wing conspiracies obstructing a valiant march into utopia. Any hesitation or questioning of this philosophical commitment to materialist solutions to deeply complex moral and social issues will be regarded as prima-facie evidence of racism, homophobia, greed, and any of a litany of pejoratives heaped upon the voices that will come crying from the wilderness. Nothing will stand in the triumphant march of materialism. And any challenge to the reign of the priesthood of secular humanism will be manifest res ipsa loquitur hate speech.

Repeated 'crises'' will grow. In fact they will become the sustained fact of life in our new America. Crisis will be the continuous hue and cry of those demanding more and more material sustenance from fewer and fewer productive, healthy and spiritually discerning Americans. And inevitably, these crises will require emergency legislation, immediate fiat and extra constitutional powers. And all of it, all the time, will by-pass prohibitions that are the legal constraints upon expanding federal government and debt. As getting money becomes the the chief purpose of government, the limits of our Constitution will deminish into insignificance. We will become a nation governed less by the rule of law and more by the will of political opportunists.  

Because entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Prescription Drug Benefits, Medicaid) and interest take up so much of the budget there is very little discretionary funding available (perhaps 21%) in the budget for other necessary things, like capital infrastructure (challenged by nature-worshipping environmentalists) and defense (war is no longer necessary in a world of socialist ecumenicalism) and most of this revenue is already spent on existent government programs. 

Here is what we need to expect. "Pay-as-you-go” sometimes called “pay-go”, is a self-limiting rule established by the U.S. House of Representatives to imposed upon itself fiduciary restraints upon spending. No money bill may be offered without there being ultimately a corresponding revenue source to fund it. This responsible House rule requires that any new-funding authorization must describe where money will be gotten to finance or expand federal programs.  This means that if a House member wants to authorize a new Federal program or expand an existing program that Congressperson must first find the funding, raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else  This “pay-go” requirement, combined with decreasing discretionary spending, means there are fewer funds available for new programs and fewer funds available to expand government.  This combination hinders Democrats and the new social materialists in our culture and will cut into the designs they have for new programs and larger, more intrusive Federal government.

Despite these sensible restraints on spending, there exists an important exception to the “pay-go” rule and that is what is regarded as “emergency spending”. The recent $700 billion Wall Street bailout, for instance, falls into this category of emergency spending. Hence any designated “emergency” by its nature, preempts and circumscribes the pay-go rule. In short, debt spending is permissible when the budgetary item is designated by Congress as “emergency spending”.  Other examples of this type of end run around “pay-go” are the Katrina Federal Relief funds (approximately $100 billion), and the Emergency Supplemental Iraq War funding bill ($106 billion).

When an emergency bill becomes necessary, Congress piles onto the “emergency bill” everything they cannot otherwise introduce or pass under the ordinary operations of the pay-go rule. This year, for example, when President Bush asked for $106 billion for Emergency Iraqi war funding, Congress heaped $62 additional billions in earmarks and new programs to the ‘emergency bill”.  Total new debt rose to $168 billion. 

Now we are looking at bailout legislation passed in the extreme emotions of a financial crisis. By this process we enlarge big government and foolishly place hundreds of billions of dollars of discretionary funding into the partisan hands of our next President and add billions of dollars to our national debt.

All this is a new trend. Crisis is intentionally becoming the standard means of enlarging government and expanding debt. We must expect, therefore, this cynical expedient of ever-increasing emergency legislation to become a permenant fixture of the political landscape in the face of a politically expansionist and ever funds-starved Congress of social engineers. Presently, "crisis" is the only way to bypass debt prohibitions and expand government. The insatiable hunger for more and larger social programs will drive this coming administrations to discover crises in places we never knew we had.

The future is fertile for crisis. The familiar terra cognita of the American political landscape soon will be full of unseen fears and sudden emergencies-- some real, most politically contrived. In our present economic trouble, crises will become fiscal necessities, no matter who is politically in-charge and no matter now real the crisis; this country will see many and repeated “emergency spending bills” signed into law. Emergency legislation and powers will be the normative condition of governance.

Remember that the powers of government expands as emergencies increase. The irony is that we may be handing special powers to government, in order to simply legitimize irresponsible social spending. Our children will not just pay for this is dollars and debt. They will pay for it with their freedom. We will not just be bankrupting our country. More important, we will be eroding our liberties by surrendering in extremis powers to the state crafted simply to fund more irresponsible and counter-productive social spending. 

Beware of the coming rule by crisis. It will not only involve issues of finance and debt --it will inevitably impinge upon our inheritance of liberty.

--Brian Rodgers