Over the last sixty years, America has been governed into the ground by a vast, expanding and unaccountable state funded by unaccountable and uncountable debt obligations that can never be repaid. There is little pretense that we will ever repay the money we are borrowing in a massive Ponzi financing scheme that can only collapse under its own weight. While acknowledging amazing advances in science and technology, we must also recognize profound failings in human governance. And these failures are more inexcusable with every passing year because rather than learning from our mistakes we are doubling down on them.
We didn’t get here overnight. Starting shortly after the Second World War, America managed itself into one foreign policy debacle after another starting with the Korean War. While avoiding nuclear conflict with Russia, we engaged in proxy wars in Asia and the Middle East that wasted blood and treasure and divided the country politically (in part because we sent minorities and the poor to fight rather than the children of the wealthy). At home, we struggled with civil rights and actually made significant progress under the Earl Warren-led Supreme Court that initiated a revolution in civil rights law in the 1950s that also protected citizens from government intrusion and overreach. This was a high watermark in American liberty.
But then America lost its innocence in 1963 when JFK was assassinated. It wasn’t just the murder of a charismatic young president that was so traumatic. It was the complicity of our government in the murder and the government’s decades of lying about what happened. That trauma was followed by the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. One-by-one, America’s most dynamic leaders who were genuinely working to enhance freedom were taken out with extreme prejudice.
Then we elected Richard Nixon who took us off the gold standard in 1971, an event of far-reaching consequences for the character of money. That the first and only president to be resign in disgrace was the one to do this must have cosmic significance of some sort. Three years later Mr. Nixon was forced from office in the Watergate scandal. Had he not resigned he would have been impeached. His own party convinced him to avoid that humiliation and step aside in a commendable act of political integrity that seems foreign to our own era.
Between 1950 and the early 1970s, America experienced political, monetary and legal earthquakes that shook its very foundations and sense of stability. During that period as well, the Vietnam War, which JFK was trying to avoid when he was killed, deeply divided the nation and led to military defeat and recriminations against the government. At the same time, President Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s promised to end poverty but also expanded both the size of and dependency on government. These Great Society programs spent trillions of dollars with good intentions but ended up falling far short of achieving their promises.
Then we entered the 21st century and experienced three crises that triggered deeply flawed response that further expanded the size and reach of government: the 9-11 attacks; the Great Financial Crisis; and the Covid-19 pandemic. In each case, government reacted by expanding its powers (often with little regard to constitutional limits) while borrowing trillions of dollars to wage war, bail out troubled institutions (who caused their own distress), and shut down the economy based on flawed scientific advice.
This leads to where we stand today – a deeply divided country, grossly overleveraged public and private economies, an overvalued Potemkin stock market inflated by government stimulus dollars and cult-like belief in artificial intelligence, a volatile climate and physical environment, and the most dangerous geopolitical chessboard since the Second World War. And overriding questions about the proper role of government in managing these challenges.
Which brings us to the most recent Supreme Court term which in my estimation was one of the most consequential in history. America is governed by a Constitution written in an earlier age with provisions not designed for the 21st century. The Justices rely on principles of statutory and constitutional interpretation but clearly have ideological and political agendas that render many of their decisions controversial (especially when some of the Justices’ family members engage in political activism). In a closely divided country, their rulings are bound to upset roughly half the populace. The Constitution was written to limit the power of the government while protecting minorities, a balance that has to be constantly negotiated through adjudication of constitutional cases. While I am sympathetic to the current bent of the Court, I acknowledge the risk of it leaning too far in a conservative direction. In some cases during the last term, most notably Trump v. United States delineating the limits of presidential power, it may have gone too far. In other cases, like Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo overruling Chevron deference, it finally overruled a bad precedent. The rule of law in this country is under threat from within and without. On balance, I believe the Supreme Court took important steps to rein in government power based on careful reading of statutes and proper application of other legal standards such as standing. The Court’s recent opinions will affect virtually every reader of this publication regardless of whether one agrees with them or not.
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