Defining terms

“Limited” Government

Mon, April 7, 2008 Comments Off by michaeltams

I was reminded this weekend as I went through the week’s mail that part of our failure as a republic – if we should fail, and there are times that it appears we might – is an inability to think clearly about words and their meaning.

The March 2008 issue of Imprimis showed up this week and featured a lecture given by professor Charles R. Kesler entitled “Limited Government: Are the Good Times Really Over?” Kesler notes in his lecture that “limited” can also be energetic and doesn’t mean “small” or “weak” for that matter. Most importantly he states that limited government must be constitutional. Here I think we find agreement as I have long thought that “balanced government” is interchangeable with “constitutionally-consistent government.”

The reality is that we’ve got imbalanced government – what some people might call “big” government. The term “big government” is only somewhat correct as the converse implies that the ideal would be small government. As envisioned by our Founders – and as codified in our Constitution – government should be balanced: there are a few limited functions of distant external government. The rest belongs to the people and the states. Should the people decide to delegate these powers to the states, in other words, some people might have “big” government, but it would be consolidated at the state level.

While getting close to the mark I’d like him to hit, Kesler doesn’t spell it out exactly as he could. Nevertheless, it’s a brilliant piece in its thorough undressing of statism and the illuminating point about its origins: the threat of the rule of the few (wealthy elites) might become tyrannical. Perhaps this point might be an area of focus for free-market advocates in order to begin to diffuse some of the arguments of the American Left.

What is Balanced Government?

Tue, February 26, 2008 Comments Off by michaeltams

I had the great fortune to get involved with the Federalist Society about two and a half years ago.  While I’m not a lawyer, I’ve always had an interest in law and public policy, and this was what drew me to the organization.

Membership, as the old saying goes, has its privileges.

It was at a Chicago Chapter event that I heard Ken Starr speak , probably a year and a half ago.  It was there that I first heard the term “balanced government.”  It is used not to describe the separation of powers (among the branches of government), but the division of powers among the spheres of government.

OK, a word on government; all right, maybe a few words.  It is important to make a distinction, for “government” is a loaded word.  Government is divided into two forms: internal (also called self-) and external.  Self-government encompasses one’s degree of the virtues of self-sufficiency and self-restraint; these two things compose self-government.  External government is everything outside the self.  External government is thought of as spheres or concentric circles reaching outward from the self.  The closest sphere of external government is the family.  The next might be the neighborhood or (church) community.  From there, the spheres increase in distance, to the city, township, county, state and federal levels.

Now, to understand what is meant by “balanced government” requires a little understanding about our forms of external government.  Our external government is the form of a republic – specifically a federal representative republic (yes, you may gently correct people when they say the United States is a “democracy”).  Our spheres of external government generally follow this model – we elect representatives, who then vote our interests (at least in theory).  This form of government was created to adopt the best aspects (like checks and balances between branches) of different forms of external government (like democracies, monarchies, and republics) by our Founding Fathers, and is codified in our Constitution.

That’s a lot of ground to cover, but we’re almost there.

The important thing to know about our federal representative republic is that it was created by and for self-governing people.  If the people aren’t self-governing – if they abdicate responsibility for themselves and insist on external government taking care of the things that the self should care for – the system isn’t going to work well, and maybe not work at all.  Sound like a government you know?

Things aren’t working well, and one could argue working not at all, not because of anything other than ourselves.  We’ve allowed an imbalance to occur between the spheres of government.  This is bad, but being aware of it is the first step.  Educating people on the nature of balanced government, and then doing concrete things to correct it, that’s where we come in.  And, hopefully, you join us in that effort.