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. 

The Mona Lisa and the Louvre demonstrate why when art imitates life, the west should pay attention.

Guest post by Martha Careful

A couple of months ago a “spontaneous strike erupted” among employees at the world’s most-visited museum, the Louvre. In protest over overwhelming crowds and chronic understaffing, employees refused to take their posts on Monday, forcing the iconic Paris museum to shut its doors. But the crowds and unmoving lines weren’t always this way, and to understand how bad they’ve gotten, one must understand how nice a visit to the Louvre used to be.

I first visited Paris 25 years ago. The Louvre was simply extraordinary, and even from the outside it is breathtaking. But on the inside, my personal favorite is the Marie de’ Medici cycle, a series of 24 giant paintings by Peter Paul Rubens chronicling the life of Marie de’ Medici, the widow of French King Henry IV. There is also Winged Victory, Venus de Milo, and paintings by everyone from Rembrandt to Jacques-Louis David to Raphael.

But, as everyone knows, the most famous and the most sought-after artwork in the Louvre is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. I remember walking into the room that held her. There were a lot of people, but it wasn’t crowded per se. You could easily walk around, and eventually you could get fairly close and try and examine her famous smile.

Since that first visit, I’ve been back to Paris many times, including a few visits to the Louvre itself. About a month ago I went once again, this time with my sister and brother-in-law. The first thing I have to say is that the throng of people in the museum was extraordinary. The line just to get through security was more than two hours!

Once inside, as the Mona Lisa was on the top of my sister’s must-see list, we headed there. The museum was as crowded as I’ve ever seen it, but you could mostly navigate around. But when we arrived at the room with da Vinci’s masterpiece, it was like something I’d never seen. It was simply insane. You were shuttled through ropes towards the masterpiece and then out on either side before actually getting within 10 feet of her. What’s worse, almost every single person was holding up their phones to take a picture or a selfie, so it was virtually impossible to get even a good glimpse of the presumed Italian beauty.

The experience was simply sad. The building I had experienced a quarter century before was the same. The works were largely the same. But the museum experience was … not. No, now there were so many people in the museum that the thing one remembers is not standing there pondering what was behind that enigmatic smile, but rather feeling like a steer in the middle of a cattle drive being prodded along with no focus on anything other than not getting trampled.

I’m no expert, but I don’t think that’s the goal of any museum. The goal of allowing ever more people in, while egalitarian, actually diminishes the experience for everyone.

So too with the West. By any measure, Western nations have built the most free, prosperous and advanced civilization in human history. Everything from cars to flight to nuclear power to advanced agriculture to television to computers to MRI machines and more, western culture has been almost exclusively behind the advances civilization has made over the last 500 years. The result has been the creation of nations that are largely more free, prosperous and functional than any in the world. Which is of course, why people want to come here.

But the problem is, like the Louvre and the Mona Lisa, too many people simply overwhelm the system and destroy the experience for everyone. But at least at the Louvre visitors buy tickets with money that is then used to maintain the museum and pay for its operations. Not so with nations.

Most of the illegal immigrants crossing rivers and seas and borders to move to the West are not paying to maintain them. In fact, not only do Western nations have to support them, but most bring with them values and cultures that are anathema to the very ideas that made Western civilization successful in the first place, i.e. Christianity, individual freedom, and capitalism.

It’s the equivalent of visitors being allowed to sneak in the back door of the Louvre then painting graffiti everywhere before starting barbecues in the rooms and using the artwork as kindling. Eventually, the museum would not only run out of masterpieces to burn, but once everything was gone, the building itself would be taken apart piece by piece and carted off. Thereafter, the progeny of the legitimate visitors and the vandals alike would be left standing by the River Seine looking at the ruins and wondering what used to stand there.

Would anyone say that such a scenario would be a good thing? That somehow the Louvre benefited from its new “undocumented” or “irregular” visitors? The answer is clearly “No.”

Just as is true on the small scale, it applies equally, if not more on a larger scale because while the Louvre’s works are generally displayed in the museum itself, the West has not only created a civilization that benefits itself, but it’s created one that has helped bring billions of people around the world out of abject poverty.

It’s understandable that Westerners have sympathy for the conditions others’ experience. The sad reality is that poverty, scarcity, war, and tyranny remain problems for many places, as they have for most of the world throughout human history. That’s troubling and most people who are relatively better off would feel some pull to try and help. But the question is, does allowing tens of millions of people from failed or war-torn or dysfunctional nations to enter the West make the world a better place? For those who escape to the West, it most certainly does. But for the West itself, not so much. Overwhelmed schools, hospitals, governments, communities, trillions of dollars of debt spending and increased rates of crime and social discord. Clearly not better.

The French national motto is “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” or Liberty, equality, fraternity. The West has taken the idea of equality and made it first among equals in terms of objectives over the last half century, and they’re well on their way of achieving it. But not in the way our leaders promised. No, rather than helping to bring freedom and prosperity to the rest of the world, they’re making the world equal by destroying those very things within their own countries, the outliers that escaped the history of man.

This should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but the elites, living in their gated communities, with their bodyguards and their Swiss bank accounts, never have to actually interact with the unwashed masses who live with the realities driven by their policies. No, they get private tours of the Louvre, fly on private jets, and enjoy private club memberships, all while making policies the consequences of which they never actually have to experience.

For anyone who loves art, the Louvre becoming a cattle drive is not a good thing. For anyone who loves liberty and prosperity, the West becoming a borderless society is a terrible thing.

Russiagate Was Treason; Will Trump Prove That No One Is Above the Law?

The esteemed Thomas Sowell, easily the most important economist of the last 50 years, turned 95 a couple of weeks ago. He has an extraordinary ability to take complex ideas about economics and culture and distill them down in prose that speaks to everyone from PhDs to those with a GED.

His ability and willingness to address issues from race to economics to history in compellingly readable books are unmatched. Indeed, his Cultures trilogy is one of the most robust weapons one might equip themselves with in any battle against the nonsensical wokeness that plagues America in the early 21st century.

As one would expect from a career spanning over six decades, Dr. Sowell has more than a few quotes that are perfect for our time. My favorite is easily:

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as racists.”

Another is:

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

As accurate as those quotes are, the following is perhaps the most insightful I’ve ever read:

“One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.”

While that quote seems like a reasonable observation in a normal political framework where politicians tell lies about one another and make promises they never intend to keep, today it’s something more. Its cutting accuracy seems to have been demonstrated every week since Donald Trump 47 took office, from USAID to intransigent bureaucrats to rogue judges. But now, finally, maybe, someone is starting to heed Dr. Sowell’s words.

I’m talking, of course, about the Russiagate hoax that Barack Obama and his national security team foisted on the American people. CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper essentially manipulated the Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] such that the impact of a Trump Russia collusion charge was devastating. And they had a bit of help from the beginning.

Essentially, they undermined the credibility of the incoming administration and saddled the country with two years of intrigue, corruption, and uncertainty in the form of an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. What’s more, Paul Ryan, the then-Speaker of the House who basically would have been just as happy with a President Hillary Clinton, would use the distraction to undermine Trump’s No. 1 issue: the border wall. He delayed the fight until after the 2018 midterms, which of course ended up being a bloodbath for the GOP.

Needless to say, Trump’s No. 1 issue was DOA when Congress reconvened.

By the time Mueller reluctantly admitted that there was nothing to the Russiagate hoax — six months after the midterms — the damage had already been done. Some coups take the form of military takeovers, others involve assassinations; this one involved a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Obama administration.

Things are not supposed to work like that. We have elections so the people can decide how they would like the nation to be governed. While there are always many people who are unhappy with the outcome, most Americans accept it because they believe in the system established by our Constitution.

John Adams said of that Constitution: "[It] was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." That is demonstrably true. It’s a piece of paper. Americans accept the outcomes of elections not because there are stormtroopers stationed on every corner ensuring acquiescence, but rather because they believe that, while flawed, our constitutional elections are a relatively honest and fair way to decide our paths forward.

Which brings us back to Sowell’s quote: “One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.” What the Obama cabal did to Donald Trump and the country was anything but moral. It was insidious, it was treacherous, and most of all, it was treasonous.

And now that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has released documents and suggested they show that Barack Obama was behind it all, we’ll get an opportunity to see what the Trump administration is really made of. It’s one thing to tell the American people about the treason of a previous administration, but it’s something else altogether to do something about it. Will it be like the Jeffrey Epstein debacle, where Americans were told the hammer is coming, only to be later told there’s nothing there? Or will this be a ruthless, methodical, and intentional prosecution of the traitors who put the nation through so much?

I would suggest that at a moment in time when public trust in government is near all-time lows, if the Trump administration has any hope of being considered successful, it will take the latter course. For far too long, Americans have watched as elites like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Barack Obama have not only gotten away with what many see as abject treason, but then they have the temerity to lecture us that “No one is above the law.”

Most Americans agree with that and believe criminals should pay for their deeds. The question is, does Donald Trump? Will he demonstrate to the American people that we are indeed a nation of laws and not men, or will he tell us once again that there’s no there there and that in modern America, the only people who face consequences for their actions are those who stand up to the swamp and the ruling elites?

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA