I’ve toyed with the idea before about finding a few really good analogies to describe what I think is our situation. To summarize, as a refresher: our form of government was deliberately created (it was created by design) after the ratification of our Constitution; the form, purpose and functioning of this new government isn’t a secret (it was created by men who took notes); along the way to our day, the people electing politicians got lazy or misled about how the government was supposed to work; and politicians either went along with this or took advantage of this, or both.

This put us in the predicament we’re in today. To summarize, we’re nearly $15 trillion dollars in debt. In an earlier post, The Institute on Air, I did the math and shared the back-up if you’re interested, but 87% of federal taxes are paid by taxpayers who make $67,000 a year or more. That makes their share of the debt $13,050,000,000,000.00. That’s a lot of zeros.

Any way you add it up, we're in a sea of red ink.

But even if in some fantasy land you could imagine that working, we’ve still got a gaping wound to bind up: politicians and the people who put them in office have no idea what the purpose of this government is supposed to be. Lucky you, America, because that’s about all I ever write about (hint, the question we all have to ask is: whose responsibility is it?).

Here’s the good news: once you understand the big picture, you see the correct principle applied everywhere. Two quick examples?

Example 1: to illustrate government is a tool, only able to do what it is designed to do properly, and will fail or deliver bad results if you deviate from this, try making some toast with your microwave. Or try cutting a sheet of plywood with a keyhole saw. Or try making grilled cheese with an iron. There are thousands of these examples that “meet people where they are.” Each of these explain the importance of original intent: why it matters that the people who created the tool had a specific plan in mind for how it should be used, and that screwing that up is almost always bad, and sometimes dangerous.

Example 2: to illustrate the concept of the division of powers, take any job or company and look at it from a design standpoint. I’ll use mine, and I’ll be as brief as possible.

I work at a big regional bank that makes loans to businesses. Local branches make their own decisions up to a certain point. Beyond a certain point, decisions have to be made by the corporate bosses. For example, if Janey works the opening teller shift, or not, isn’t relevant to the guys at headquarters. If we open a slot machine right next to an ATM is relevant to the guys at headquarters. If Janey opens an account for someone off the street isn’t terribly relevant. If she makes a $200 million loan to someone is terribly relevant. Got it? Decision making can’t all be centralized. If decisions like ordering Post-its and opening the day’s mail had to be run by the big shots in headquarters, nothing would ever get done. Just as bad, the things that the guys in HQ need to be focused on, the really important stuff, would be getting screwed up all the time because they’d be making decisions about light bulbs.

That, my friends, is exactly what we’re doing in America. We’ve got people in Washington telling people in San Diego what they should be teaching kids. And how much water should be in their toilets. And what types of light bulbs, God help us, they should be using.

Get educated, talk to people, and insist on better than we’ve been offered. Change the conversation. Don’t wait for someone else to do it; it’s each our duty as Americans. When politicians insist on concentrating power in Washington, what they’re saying is that we’re not responsible enough to make decisions about our lives. Are they right?

To simplify a complicated issue, I propose that there are a few things that reasonable people can agree on, and these points are:

1. health insurance is expensive;
2. without health insurance, if you get a major illness or injury, the financial burden may be disastrous;
3. no one wants their fellow man to suffer financial ruin through no fault of their own; and
4. in a compassionate world, there would be a way to care for all of the most unfortunate of our fellow man.

Where we encounter difficulty is in what manner we can properly address this manifestation of inequity. Despite beliefs to the contrary, evidently, by large segments of the American public, health insurance is not a civil right, nor is it a human right. If insisting the opposite could cure the problem, we would be obliged to insist that mandated home ownership would cure homelessness; and our recent national experience in the real estate market might be an effective argument against pushing home ownership as government policy. We might also note that when a person is disabled or dies without disability or life insurance, the costs to the family can be devastating, but this does not lead politicians to call for universal disability insurance, or universal life insurance.

What the health care debate is all about, again, is the reach of government under the guise of compassion for our fellow man. I mean “guise of compassion” to be read without malice, and possibly, without awareness on behalf of advocates for national health care reform. They may indeed be well-intentioned and not see the fallacy of their ground. At this point, however, there is a reasonable solution that is simple to understand, and would be readily accepted by most Americans; I might be so bold as to say it would be accepted by all Americans.

Not a word therein absolves us of responsibility for ourselves

This paradigm, in which a domestic matter affecting the lives of Americans is either discharged, or it is not, by a local unit of government, is precisely how American government was intended to work. Our system is neither mysterious nor difficult to comprehend. James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist #45:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

In plain English, national governments must be occupied with national issues. Local governments must be occupied with local issues. National issues are those that Madison identified, to which it is reasonable to add administering the national courts, mitigating disputes between the states, and serving as a defender of last resort of the inalienable rights of the citizens of the country. That’s it.

Our health care/health insurance debate should be a good thing, but it’s not. We should be debating what the just duties of government are at each level, including the self, but we’re not. Like a sick patient putting off going to the doctor for fear of what the diagnosis will be, we’re delaying an inevitable reckoning, and making that much harder the work that will have to be done, or the patient will die.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story entitled “U.S. Effort to Remove Drug CEO Jolts Firms” today, describing the conflict between the government and a drug manufacturer. As the Journal reports:

The Department of Health and Human Services this month notified Howard Solomon of Forest Laboratories Inc. that it intends to exclude him from doing business with the federal government. This, in turn, could prevent Forest from selling its drugs to Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Administration. If the government implements its ban, Forest would have to dump Mr. Solomon, now 83 years old, in order to protect its corporate revenue. No drug company, large or small, can afford to lose out on sales to the federal government, a major customer.

The background: in September 2010, the company made a plea deal to pay fines related to marketing misconduct of two of its anti-depressant drugs. Mr. Solomon, the CEO, was never accused by the government of misconduct, and the company’s fines were not insubstantial ($313 million in penalties). The Department of HHS initiated intent to ban action against Mr. Solomon and Forest after reaching a settlement with the company.

The world's most dangerous document

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Are our rights secured? Do we consent to this government? Has the government become destructive of our rights? Can it be altered?

We’re at a critical point in time in the history of our Republic, and the answers to these questions are troubling. Perhaps we still have our liberty, and every supposed infringement is merely media-induced hysteria. I’ll grant the reader that often, the bark is worse than the bite. We are right to ask, however: if the federal government may force a company to fire its CEO and hire a new CEO, where does the power of the federal government end?

“Sanitary Fairs” sprung up spontaneously around the country and served Union soldiers traveling to or from the front. All-volunteer in nature, these were places of caring, rest, sustenance and all were born out of a patriotic sentiment and gratitude to the Union troops.

President Lincoln, The Great Emancipator

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty… Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty…

And how are things this morning in America? People will gather today to decry the taking of their property in the form of taxation, and nearly half of America will shake their heads and say that they can’t believe these Tea Party people are real. The people present at these Tea Parties, for their part, can hardly believe that recently in Wisconsin, public union employees were protesting, rallying, and decrying the “oppressive” actions of their government, whose objective was something as tyrannical as balancing their budget. Here we find ourselves.

We may yet have a long way to go. I recently heard a Congresswoman speaking before a group of Republicans, and her over-riding theme was that there are no easy answers with the budget; governing is hard work; it is difficult to find places to cut spending; and we have to govern. As a public service, I would respectfully submit the following to you, for your unattributed use, should you ever hear such a sentiment uttered.

We have district boards of education that manage the affairs of our district’s schools. We have county-wide regional superintendents of schools. We have state Boards of Education. We have a federal Department of Education. Now this last agency keeps growing and getting bigger, but are you aware of the degree? The measure of a company’s assets in excess of its liabilities is called its net worth, and the USDOE has a net worth of $87.6 billion; that is money that has been taken from Americans in taxes and built up, over time. This agency (you can see their annual report for yourself) spent $99.6 billion in 2010. If we’re challenged on where to cut expenditures, $100 billion a year plus the $87 billion in the bank is a good place to start. Let the states fund their educational systems however they please.

Indeed, we may have a long way to go. We’re as divided as we’ve been in a long time. Finding common ground will be a challenge, but our alternative – a bleak, acrimonious future of debt and failure – is not much of an alternative. If you attend a Tea Party, enjoy yourself, but remember that shouting and rallying only accomplishes so much. At some point, we need to get engaged and begin to take back the high ground in our relationship with government at all levels. At some point, we need to speak to all Americans on the serious Republic-threatening risks before us.

We may not ever come up with a definition of liberty that all people can agree upon, but it is worth trying.

Now, reasonable people will correctly infer that what the President meant was that a budget plan that cut certain programs was inconsistent with our values as Americans, somehow, and thus deserving of the “un-American” label. We could quibble at the fringes of this topic by discussing what he meant; what values we’re betraying, in his mind, by making an attempt at fiscal sanity. Let’s not do that. Let’s take another approach. Namely, there’s two gigantic pitfalls here that a politician of average intelligence should have seen, and avoided stepping in. The President didn’t, and instead has picked a strange fight. Now, most people will admit he is an intelligent man, so we can only look to the President’s ideology as his Achilles heel in this case.

Ryan’s plan, briefly, as the Weekly Standard notes “would cut 46 percent and $4.4 trillion from proposed deficit spending under President Obama’s budget, reform Medicare and Medicaid to put these programs on solid financial footing, and repeal Obamacare.” There are two problems with attacking Ryan’s plan as he did, and here I mean specifically calling it un-American.

Do you know what this document intends?

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

Got that? Anything deviating from the intended design (that design created and ratified by Americans in 1787), then, is more accurately deserving of the un-American label. Forget all of the touchy-feely intentions of nice people for a minute, Mr. President: it’s outcomes that count in the real world.

Secondly, and more damaging, this may very well be Mr. Obama’s “Mission Accomplished” moment: calling spending cuts un-American is a slap in the face of every American who can’t print money or borrow from the Chinese. Every individual, family or business has to be focused like a laser on 1. how much they make and 2. how much they spend. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had since the beginning of the recession with friends, family, and business owners, and they all have to be painfully aware of where every dollar comes from and where every dollar goes.

(Naturally if you work for the government, this all sounds like a foreign language to you.)

Rep. Ryan gets it. His budget proposal might not be perfect, but we have an extraordinary, existence-of-the-Republic-threatening problem on our hands. We’re $14 trillion in debt. Remember how President Bush was mocked endlessly for the “Mission Accomplished” banner? Calling the hard spending discipline that every American family has to do “un-American” further suggests that the President is out of touch and blinded by his ideology, two persistent knocks against him.

Not a good combination in your Commander-in-Chief.