Writing in American Thinker, C. Edmund Wright makes a point about the NY-23 race that I hadn’t considered:
That we all know—let alone care—about the goings-on in New York’s 23rd Congressional District speaks volumes about how far away from our founding principles we have drifted. We should not know or care about NY 23 under our founding model, but make no mistake: we do know. We do care. We have drifted a long way.
His argument is essentially that the explosive growth of government over the past century and more has broken the practical and philosophical foundation and justification of that government.
The idea—quaint as it sounds now—is that any problem you might have with a tiny government could be solved by simply sitting down with some local citizen legislator and working it out. Think Mayberry, where you could hash anything out with Andy, Barney, and the mayor at Floyd’s Barbershop.
If that didn’t work, you could simply run for office in a fair fight in a couple years. The incumbent would probably have tired of government “service” by then anyway. What a process!
The Feds? Oh, they were just a few guys to handle the Barbary Pirates and such. The idea was that you could live your life and never have to see, let alone deal with, anyone from a strong centralized government if you chose not to. You sent them a few bucks to fund the military each year and everything was fine. Thus the once-true cliché: all politics are local.
Now, as he points out, that’s no longer true:
Most of the key people who are pushing this health care legislation are extreme liberals from parts of the country that will never fail to reelect them. The vast majority of the people they will affect, however, have no say in whether or not they get reelected.
This allows them to stay in the halls of power for so long that they accumulate power over years and years of simply being in Washington. Thus, the longer they are isolated from reality, the more power they have to change reality. Gee, what could go wrong with that scenario?
And this is exactly what our Founding Fathers did not want. King George was 5,000 miles away geographically, and even farther apart experientially from the colonies. Our country was founded precisely because the British model was deemed so unworkable and evil that it demanded we spill blood and treasure to stop it. Among the war cries were “Don’t Tread on Me” and “No Taxation Without Representation.” . . .
Consider that Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel can heap oppressive taxation on hundreds of millions of us, yet we have no say in their “representation” status. In Rangel’s case, he casually avoids living under those same tax rules. Now I consider this a slight violation of that “Don’t Tread on Me” concept.
The logical consequence of that is that the old cliché is inverted, and now all politics is national; the race in New York’s 23rd Congressional District will affect the whole country, and thus we all have a stake in it, far beyond the folks who can actually vote there. Which, I agree with Wright, is not the way this ought to work. Read the whole thing—he’s on to something important here.