On the Founding Fathers

The Federalist Papers and the constitutional convention debates are rife with arguments about the separation of powers.  Now, stick with me on this, because this is a fundamental point.  The whole theory of the separation of powers, meaning legislative branch, judicial branch, executive branch, was ingeniously based on human nature.  Our Founding Fathers had studied history, and they knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely.  So we divide power.  We divide power between the states and the federal government.  We divide power within the federal government.  And we further divide power among three separate branches of government.  We give each branch a different set of powers and incentives to protect their own prerogatives so they can keep an eye on each other.  These are called checks and balances.  And the liberals love talking about checks and balances very much.

The underlying assumption of this whole system is that the country functions better if everyone is of a skeptical bent of mind.  That's what keeps the next guy honest.  The whole reason that we have divided government instead of a king is that the issue is not about one government official succeeding.  This country was not founded on the principle that the president is a king and above all the king must succeed.  In fact, the system is designed to ensure that the president fails when he is wrong.  That's the whole purpose of checks and balances.  The whole purpose of dividing power, is to ensure the president fails when he's wrong.  The Framers wanted the country to succeed, just as I do.  If they wanted the president to succeed, they would not have saddled him with Congress, they wouldn't have saddled him with the courts, they wouldn't have saddled him with the free press, and they wouldn't have made him face reelection every four years.  They would have made him a king who no one could oppose.

If our nation was all about a single individual succeeding simply because that individual must succeed regardless, we wouldn't have the form of government that we do.  Now, conflating the president and the country -- and by that I mean, assuming that the president is always the country, assuming that the president always has the country's best interests at heart, such as the founders did, turns a functioning democracy into a robotic cult.  I fear that that's what we have right now.  We have a cult of fear and celebrity, robotic cult, that is epitomized in Warren Buffett, it's epitomized by Jack Welch, it's epitomized by Barton Biggs and Jim Cramer and anybody else who knows what they see is devastatingly wrong, is horribly wrong, but because there is a fear to oppose because the assumption is that Obama is the country, that Obama equals the best interests of the country simply because he's Obama, that's what gives you a cult.

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