New Golden Rule: Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto You?

Ol' Remus has a post up at Eternity Road entitled Default that Francis Porretto is at pains to have us read. So go read it.

One of the things that struck me in this post, something I have long known, but haven't spoken about out loud is:

At present, complexity is yielding ground to adaptability. We're well into it. We are no longer a nation of laws, we are a nation of men, especially those men who were the first to figure out there is no legitimacy on offer, and where there is no legitimacy there are no restraints. Surely you have noticed that all enterprises are, or are becoming, criminal enterprises. Absent legitimacy, it's a race to the bottom—that eternal, irreducible power center. Here the violent will prevail over the merely criminal, and the homicidal will prevail over the merely violent. Mexico is a nearby example.

I feel like a broken record here, or maybe like a lone nut standing between a sandwich board trying to tell my fellow citizens something they just don't want to hear: if our government acted solely within the bounds prescribed by the Constitution, we would not be in this mess.  Our Federal Government would not have a Department of Energy, or a Department of Education.  We would not have Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,  Aid to Dependent Children or any of the other things weighing our system down.  The EPA would not be writing regulations, because that would be the job of our legislature, not the executive.  The executive, freed from writing legislation, could concentrate on doing its job in protecting our borders and defending us from foreign enemies.  And maybe, just maybe, the Courts could be dissuaded from trying to "interpret" our Constitution into oblivion.

Well, one can wish...

If only we returned to Constitutional governance.