With the government shutdown entering its second week, the blame game is reaching new heights. In the Washington Post, Ezra Klein lists thirteen reasons why Washington is failing. The biggest reason, according to Klein, is that
Systems like our own have a broad tendency toward instability and partisan conflict because a democratically elected executive can come from one party and a democratically elected legislature from another. Both sides end up having control over some levers of power, a claim to be carrying out the will of the public, and incentives that point in opposite directions. That’s very different than the kind of system you see in, say, the United Kingdom, where only one party controls the government at any given time.
“We can say with at least some certainty that if highly divided countries adopt executive-centered presidential systems, then they are probably making a mistake,” Robert Elgie of Dublin City University concludes.
While Klein touches on the truth, he fails to identify it fully. Democracies are unstable, and that is precisely why the Founders were opposed to democracy.
James Madison, for example, wrote “There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.” Thomas Jefferson stated that “a democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
In a democracy, the majority may do as it pleases simply because it is the majority. It is a tyranny of the masses, in which the “will of the people” can confiscate wealth to pay for Obamacare, put Socrates to death for expounding “dangerous” ideas, or elect a genocidal maniac–Hitler–to lead a nation.
Klein notes that both Republicans and Democrats claim to be “carrying out the will of the public,” and yet, the two sides claim much different ideas on what that will is. In truth, both sides are attempting to implement the will of a portion of the public–their constituents.
“The public” does not speak with one voice, as the impasse in Washington makes clear. There are some who want subsidized health care, and there are some who do not want to provide those subsidies. There are some who want the federal government to balance the budget, and there are some who want the government to continue playing Santa Claus. What we have is one part of “the public” wanting to use government to rob the another part of “the public.”
Despite what many pundits and Democrats claim, the solution isn’t compromise. A compromise would simply mean that government would not take as much from the productive to give to the non-productive. The solution is for government to protect the rights of the productive. The only proper purpose of government is the protection of individual rights, including property rights. The solution is to return to the principles of the Founding Fathers.