Remi Cornwall wrote:
How do you regulate government then? Who governs the governors? When do
governments vote themselves less power?
That's a odd question. Democratic governments never vote on anything.
Only the voters do.
US and British voters have repeatedly given our governments
tremendous power in times of crisis, and then taken away these powers
later on. That is the sensible thing to do. In the US, power was
concentrated in the hands of the president during the Civil War,
World War I, the Great Depression and World War II. As each of these
crises ebbed away, the emergency powers and high taxes were gradually
withdrawn. From 1942 until 1963 in the U.S., in response to WWII, the
highest tax bracket varied from 88% to 92%. By 1963 the huge war debt
was paid down (or inflated away) and tax brackets were lowered. See:
http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=19
In the U.S., most emergency controls over the economy were lifted
abruptly after the war, but not so quickly in the UK, where food was
rationed from 1940 until 1954. No sane person questioned the need for
rationing although perhaps it should have been ended earlier.
From the 1950s through the 1970s the U.S. government regulated
telecommunications, airlines, trucking, advertising and many other
fields of commerce that today have been largely deregulated, because
we decided that deregulation works better and also because in the
case of telecommunications, the technology improved to allow more
than one telephone company to serve effectively.
These things constantly ebb and flow in response to changes in
technology and public opinion. That is as it should be. There are no
permanent solutions in politics or society. What works in one era
does not necessarily work in another. FDR's policies were appropriate
and effective to revive the 1930s industrial economy, but they would
be ridiculous today. No solution is perfect. The balance of power
between the branches of government also varies from one era to
another in response to political developments, technology, the force
of history, the personality of the chief executive and so on.
- Jed
