An 18th Century Scottish Historian Foretells 21st Century America

Our Constitution, perhaps the greatest document in human history behind the Bible, is not quite perfect. In 2025 we can see things that might have been added. Number one is probably term limits.  Another would be a prohibition on deficit spending outside of war.  And maybe they could have added something about judges being responsible for the crimes the criminals they release into society commit…

No doubt there are countless things we could sit here 250 years later and think of that the Founding Fathers could have added but didn’t because they couldn’t see into the future. One thing they could see clearly was that the nature of man is to accumulate power, use that power to take from others and that the most effective way of doing both is by harnessing the power of government. 

Alas, it wasn’t possible to put frameworks in place to control all of the base instincts of men as they are simply unending and evolve constantly. The Founders could not envision our world.  They could write about freedom of speech and the press, but they couldn’t have known about radio or mobile phones or the dark web or Bitcoin or shadowbanning. 

Nonetheless one of the greatest attributes of their Constitution was its staggered terms. The House, the place from which spending originates, is the closest to the people and is elected every two years. The President, who executes the laws, has a term of four years.  Then the Senate, originally the representatives of the state legislatures, serve staggered six-year terms.

The goal of these staggered terms was to tamp the passions of men such that if a majority wanted something they couldn’t easily command it and it would take years for them to take control over the government. The Founders understood that tempers run hot but cooler heads often prevail with time and therefore they wrote a document with built in cooling off periods.

What the Founding Fathers never envisioned however was a permanent government, in either the elected officials or the bureaucracy.  Sadly, today we have both. That wouldn’t be a significant problem if government was as small as it was initially.  Indeed, for America’s first 50 years we had a Department of State, Treasury, War, Attorney General and Postmaster General.  That was it.  Interior and Agriculture came in the middle of the 19^th century when the country was adding states and territories rapidly and farming was becoming a major point of conflict between cattle herders, sheep herders, farmers and miners, not to mention Indians.  Nothing more until the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903 – the two split in 1913.

The point is, for most of the first half of America’s history the federal government was essentially an afterthought in the minds of most Americans.  For the Founding Fathers government was part time.  Today it’s anything but. To put this in perspective, there have been almost 2,000 people who have served as a US Senator, and of the 25 who served the longest, all but one started his career in the 20^th century – 15 of them after 1960 – and two are still there!  Similarly, over in the House, where 12,000 people have served as Representatives, of the 33 longest serving, all but one began their service in the 20^th century and four are current members.  The Founding Fathers didn’t see a need for term limits because for them Congress was a service to the country, not a job, and certainly not a permanent career.

Today the federal government is anything but an afterthought in the lives of Americans. Not only does it seek to control almost every aspect of our lives, but it spends like a drunken sailor on liberty weekend.  Not surprisingly, most of the regulations that stifle productivity and innovation and the departments from which most spending emerges are those created in the last century. Seventy five percent of the federal government spending is on things that simply exist at the federal level for our first 150 years.  From healthcare spending to food stamps to Social Security to education, the limited government our Founding Fathers left us with has metastasized into a borg that grows year after year, regardless of who’s in control. 

This does not end well, particularly as the United States is $37 trillion in debt, with twice that in unfunded obligations.  The words of Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler explains why:  “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

On our present course, that is America’s fate. Sadly we have few leaders willing to tell Americans the truth about that reality.  While we have men like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, Americans writ large don’t seem to be interested in following them. 

There are solutions however.  The FairTax would be a giant step in the right direction as it would remove from politician’s hands the ability to manipulate the tax code to give donors goodies. We could sunset regulations.  As an example, every law on the books would sunset after 10 years unless it was renewed by Congress, and would face sunset every 10 years unless it was passed by 60% of each house. Then there’s zero based budgeting, where every department must justify its entire budget from scratch every two years.  At the same time, welfare and other wealth redistribution programs that were never part of the Constitution in the first place must be eliminated, perhaps phased out over a four year period.  And of course, not to be forgotten… term limits.

Implementing these steps would rein in government spending and regulation, but more importantly they would simultaneously unleash an economic juggernaut unlike anything the world has ever seen. 

But as Tytler suggested, that’s not how things usually work. In 1776 a group of extraordinary men risked their lives and livelihoods to give free men an opportunity to build a new nation based on individual liberty and limited government. But before they could do that they needed to inspire the colonies’ citizens, two thirds of whom either wanted to remain British or were undecided.  Against all odds they not only inspired a nation but led it to victory against the world’s most powerful empire. 

But then they did something even more amazing.  Building on the Declaration of Independence’s recognition that rights come from God, they wrote the world’s first constitution based on those individual rights and framed a limited government to allow men to exercise them. 

Today America needs a new group of would-be heroes, men willing to target the entrenched barnacles that have grown up around our Constitution and the leeches that feed off both. It will take wordsmiths like Payne and Jefferson, coalition builders like Madison and Marshall and a leader like Washington to have any chance at success. Let’s hope they emerge before Tytler’s warning comes true.