Eliminating all rivals

The relative freedom our nation's enjoyed for a couple hundred years is based on the original wide dispersion of power. It was more than a matter of three branches of government; it was limiting the amount of power those three branches could argue over in the first place, reserving the majority of action to states or to individuals.

The sad history since the ratification of the Constitution has been one long, steady march of undoing all the carefully constructed barriers to consolidating power. Along the way, "crises," real and manufactured, have only sped the process along.

"Isn't this exciting?" Rep. Ed Markey enthused to me on Oct. 19, 1987 ("Black Monday"). A young congressional correspondent for Newsweek with nary a stock or bond to my name, even I was taken aback by Markey's undisguised pleasure. When you stop and think about it, though, it makes perfect sense. Modern Washington owes its very existence to the 1929 crash, which occasioned a vast expansion of the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A legacy of the increase in federal power during that era, largely undiminished during a 28-year electoral backlash against big government, is that Washington became Wall Street's principal rival when it came to running the world. Which wielded more power—the financial markets or the government?

Of course, the creation of modern Washington didn't happen overnight with the 1929 crash. First the War of Northern Aggression brought the States to heel, removing one of the main counterweights to a potential Federal government run amok. Newly unleashed, it was then a simple matter to tap, like a parasite, directly into the citizenry through a previously unConstitutional income tax. Throw in a Federal Reserve (which is neither, by the way), the proliferation of Executive Orders, and voila! You have consolidated power just about defined.

In a healthy society, the "gubmint" is but one authority, in a symbiotic relationship with others--church, family, etc. The definition of totalitarianism is government brooking no rivals or checks on its power over every aspect of life. We may not feel the jackboots yet, but our government has decided it's the arbiter of its own limits. Rule of law? Only when it advances the interests of Leviathan.