I offer this explanation. Look to the Congress. Every member soon after election, no matter what their intentions were while running, once elected, (with but a few exceptions), become only interested in staying in power; and a good chance to become wealthy. This over the “public good.” Too often when rules and regulations become unpopular, the electorate is ignored, and Congress does nothing. How do we get our government back? First, we need to understand how we got to where we are. Today a huge federal bureaucracy decides what they think is best for us, and we are left with no voice when it displeases us.
How did we get to our huge government bureaucracy? President Franklin Roosevelt may have started it, but he was mostly consumed by running our Second World War effort. Eisenhower, a Republican President, oversaw the creation of HEW, the Health, Education, and Welfare Department, succeeded by Agencies that today account for more than half the federal expenditures. But it was President Lyndon Johnson, elected in 1964, that really exploded the federal bureaucracy. This expansion went especially active in the 1964-1975 period.
Congress aided and abetted this federal expansion, and soon started looking at the gravy-train they found themselves enjoying. First, they started by giving up legislating. They then turned over making laws to “specialists” in the various government agencies, who had special training in one of the many fields the government had entered. Then Congress found it more “fun” to be a watchdog of the bureaucracy and just perform oversight and investigations. Soon Congress made getting reelected their priority and discovered the vast amount of contributions they could solicit from national lobbyists who were working to inform and shape the various laws the bureaucracy was creating. With unlimited campaign money from the lobbyists, incumbency in Congress became impenetrable to any challengers. This fundamental change from what the founding fathers had created resulted in the electorate no longer being able to influence their representatives in the Congress, so today it is really a tyranny of representative government.
Everyone inside the Washington beltway is complicit in this conspiracy. That’s Republicans and Democrats, as well as both liberal and conservative think tanks, and the entire news media. And they are now aided by the universities that train the various specialists who are destined to later enter the bureaucracy. Universities today are citadels of liberalism and progressive thought. Capitalism, individualism, and freedom is derided and large government and socialism promoted.
Then in 2016, Donald Trump came along as an outsider, with a completely different perspective on how to run a government, and he got elected. His emphasis is on results. He changed strategies as necessary to get the results he believed were for the “public good.” Being different and from outside of the beltway bubble, he immediately got the attention of everyone within the beltway, and they felt threatened. They all came to hate Donald Trump, and they are now obsessed with getting rid of him.
John Marini, a political science professor (Reno, Nevada) has studied this affront to our democracy for all his life and has now written about it. His book is Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century. He says it took a hundred years to build up the bloated government bureaucracy, and Trump is just on the first step in changing this. It will probably take another one hundred years.
RETURN TO CAPITALISM 