Principles Of Government

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(A) Articles are foundational content and (B) Articles are urgently important but may be replaced as they become dated

(A) Politics, Political Parties, Election Regulations

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    • The Deep State Is All Too Real A

    By David Bernhardt - May 9, 2023

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    By David Bernhardt – Grade-school civics teaches that Washington is designed to operate under a system of checks and balances, constrained by the Constitution and empowered by the consent of the governed. In practice, however, power has become concentrated in the executive branch and largely wielded by unaccountable career bureaucrats. The notion of a “deep state” isn’t a conspiratorial talking point but a manifest political reality….The separation of powers is an animating principle of our nation’s founding documents.
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    How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage AA

    By Fred Siegel - Jan. 25, 2011

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    By Fred Siegel – But there was another “rights” movement, largely overlooked, that has also had a profound effect on American life. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same years when public employees, already protected by civil-service rules, gained the right to bargain collectively. Read More

    For Saner Politics Try Strong Parties AA

    By Gerald F. Seib - April 20, 2023

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    By Gerald F. Seib – Today, the movement to weaken the national party structures that began in 1968 has reached its logical result: The power of the two national party organizations has declined so dramatically that they sometimes appear to be bystanders to a political system in which they were once central actors. This trend… is now contributing to the polarization and dysfunction of America’s political system. The decline of party organizations has opened the way for the rise of more extreme voices and, crucially, turned much of the financing of campaigns over to less-accountable players. The extremes of left and right have been strengthened … Read More

    Ex-Liberal Fred Siegel Saw New York Fall and Rise – Steven Malanga A

    By Steven Malanga - May 9, 2023

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    By Steven Malanga – As a New Yorker, Siegel had witnessed the city’s rapid deterioration under … a vast expansion of crime and social disorder. Siegel and other conservative intellectuals at the Manhattan Institute argued that the sharp rise in urban chaos wasn’t inevitable or irreversible…In fact, disorder was a choice. By cutting police and sanitation budgets to boost welfare spending, …The worse things got, the more the city invested in addressing the supposed underlying causes of crime rather than re-establishing order. Siegel … called this “rewarding failure.”…The “riot ideology” that Fred Siegel described in his 1997 book, “The Future Once Happened Here,” played a significant role in the decline of America’s cities in the 1970s and ’80s. Siegel, who died Sunday at 78, wrote that the riot ideology rested on the assumption that “the sins of racism” justified violence and criminality—and that only federal spending could solve those problems. Read More

    Congress Once Constrained Government Debt AA

    By John F. Cogan - Jan. 23, 2023 

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    By Judy Shelton – Entitlement programs have accounted for all the growth in federal spending relative to gross domestic product in the past 60 years, causing the persistent budget deficits during that period. Entitlement expenditures are determined differently from so-called discretionary programs. Spending on the latter programs is set by fixed appropriations of money. Entitlement expenditures aren’t fixed in advance but determined by the program’s level of benefits, its eligibility rules and economic factors. Jurisdiction for entitlement legislation is dispersed among more than a dozen committees in each congressional chamber….In this system, no committee is accountable for total spending. Each committee has a reason to expand its programs and resist attempts to restrain them, but none have an incentive to keep overall spending down. It’s analogous to the classic tragedy of the commons. Read More