“At some point, isn’t it time to admit the system is broken?” So
wrote Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein on Thursday. It
was a phrase in widespread use for the past few weeks.
The intro to CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday
asked, “As Americans watch a broken government, can Washington
avoid economic catastrophe?”
“Government is broken and it’s not going to be repaired by
next Tuesday,” Bob Edgar, head of Common Cause, said last
week.
Something that is broken does not work as intended. It has
been damaged by an outside force. The debt ceiling negotiations
revealed many things, but never that the United States government
is broken. On the contrary, the government worked exactly as
designed.
The party in control of the White House and the Senate
disagreed with the party in control of the House. The disagreement
was resolved through prolonged negotiations that resulted in a
compromise that the president and a majority in Congress could and
did accept. Disagreements in Washington have been worked out in
precisely that way for centuries, just as the Founders
anticipated.
The U.S. government is not broken; it is dysfunctional.
That is, it functions, but in an unhealthy way, a way that needs to
be corrected. And that dysfunction was the direct cause of the
debt-ceiling “crisis.”
Unlike most state governments, the federal government has
no mechanism that prevents prolonged deficit spending. Congress and
the president can spend more than the government takes in, forever,
or at least until no one will lend to the government
anymore.
Thomas Jefferson recognized this flaw
immediately.
“No man is more ardently intent to see the public debt
soon and sacredly paid off than I am,” he wrote to President
Washington in 1792. “This exactly marks the difference between
Colonel Hamilton’s views and mine, that I would wish the debt paid
to-morrow; he wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing
wherewith to corrupt and manage the Legislature.”
To Senator, and former House Speaker, Nathaniel Macon,
Jefferson wrote in 1821, “There does not exist an engine so
demoralizing of the nation as a public debt. It will bring on us
more ruin at home than all the enemies from abroad against whom
this army and navy are to protect us.”
Jefferson thought a perpetual public debt was so injurious
to liberty that he theorized a way of preventing one generation
from passing a debt on to the next. In a letter to John Eppes in
1813, he wrote, “What is to hinder (the government) from creating a
perpetual debt? The laws of nature, I answer.” Each generation
would be limited to accumulating only the debt that it could pay
off before it died, he theorized.
“Suppose that a majority, on the first day of the year
1794, had borrowed a sum of money equal to the fee-simple value of
the State, and to have consumed it in eating, drinking and making
merry in their day; or if you please, quarrelling and fighting with
their unoffending neighbors.”
If that generation tried to pass that debt to the next
generation, “Every one will say no,” Jefferson wrote, “… the laws
of nature impose no obligation on them to pay this debt. And
although, like some other natural rights, this has not yet entered
into any declaration of rights, it is no less a law, and ought to
be acted on by honest governments.”
Jefferson’s theory notwithstanding, this “law” has yet to
be acknowledged by our government, much less written into the
Constitution or our statutes. With no restraint on the accumulation
of long-term debt, Jefferson’s worst fears have been realized. Our
politicians have figured out that they can benefit themselves by
borrowing excessively and passing the bill to the next generation,
which is exactly what they have done. The current debt is more than
$14 trillion, or nearly $47,000 per U.S. citizen. Jefferson would
be appalled.
That “perpetual debt,” as Jefferson called it — not the
recent “crisis” caused by taking the debt ceiling seriously — is
our government’s real dysfunction, and what must be fixed if we are
to reclaim the liberty that comes, as Jefferson knew, from being
freed of the “torment” of perpetual indebtedness.
